I arrived at Yasnaya the day after her death, I was aware of an
atmosphere of exaltation and prayerful emotion about the whole family,
and it was then I think for the first time that I realized the full
grandeur and beauty of death.

I definitely felt that by her death Masha, so far from having gone away
from us, had come nearer to us, and had been, as it were, welded to us
forever in a way that she never could have been during her lifetime.

I observed the same frame of mind in my father. He went about silent and
woebegone, summoning all his strength to battle with his own sorrow; but
I never heard him utter a murmur of a complaint, only words of tender
emotion. When the coffin was carried to the church he changed his
clothes and went with the cortege. When he reached the stone pillars
he stopped us, said farewell to the departed, and walked home along the
avenue. I looked after him and watched him walk away across the wet,
thawing snow with his short, quick old man's steps, turning his toes out
at a sharp angle, as he always did, and never once looking round.

My sister Masha had held a position of great importance in my father's
life and in the life of the whole family. Many a time in the last few
years have we had occasion to think of her and to murmur sadly: "If only
Masha had been with us! If only Masha had not died!"

In order to explain the relations between Masha and my father I must
turn back a considerable way. There was one distinguishing and, at first
sight, peculiar trait in my father's character, due perhaps to the fact
that he grew up without a mother, and that was that all exhibitions of
tenderness were entirely foreign to him.

I say "tenderness" in contradistinction to heartiness. Heartiness he had
and in a very high degree.

His description of the death of my Uncle Nikolai is characteristic in
this connection. In a letter to his other brother, Sergei Nikolayevitch,
in which he described the last day of his brother's life, my father
tells how he helped him to undress.

"He submitted, and became a different man.... He had a word of praise
for everybody, and said to me, 'Thanks, my friend.' You understand the
significance of the words as between us two."

It is evident that in the language of the Tolstoy brothers the phrase
"my friend" was an expression of tenderness beyond which imagination
could not go. The words astonished my father even on the lips of his
dying brother.

During all his lif