etime I never received any mark of tenderness from him
whatever.

He was not fond of kissing children, and when he did so in saying good
morning or good night, he did it merely as a duty.

It is therefore easy to understand that he did not provoke any display
of tenderness toward himself, and that nearness and dearness with him
were never accompanied by any outward manifestations.

It would never have come into my head, for instance, to walk up to my
father and kiss him or to stroke his hand. I was partly prevented also
from that by the fact that I always looked up to him with awe, and his
spiritual power, his greatness, prevented me from seeing in him the mere
man--the man who was so plaintive and weary at times, the feeble old man
who so much needed warmth and rest.

The only person who could give him that warmth was Masha.

She would go up to him, stroke his hand, caress him, and say something
affectionate, and you could see that he liked it, was happy, and even
responded in kind. It was as if he became a different man with her. Why
was it that Masha was able to do this, while no one else even dared to
try? If any other of us had done it, it would have seemed unnatural, but
Masha could do it with perfect simplicity and sincerity.

I do not mean to say that others about my father loved him less than
Masha; not at all; but the display of love for him was never so warm and
at the same time so natural with any one else as with her.

So that with Masha's death my father was deprived of this natural source
of warmth, which, with advancing years, had become more and more of a
necessity for him.

Another and still greater power that she possessed was her remarkably
delicate and sensitive conscience. This trait in her was still dearer to
my father than her caresses.

How good she was at smoothing away all misunderstandings! How she always
stood up for those who were found any fault with, justly or unjustly! It
was all the same to her. Masha could reconcile everybody and everything.

During the last years of his life my father's health perceptibly grew
worse. Several times he had the most sudden and inexplicable sort
of fainting fits, from which he used to recover the next day, but
completely lost his memory for a time.

Seeing my brother Andrei's children, who were staying at Yasnaya, in the
zala one day, he asked with some surprise, "Whose children are these?"
Meeting my wife, he said, "Don't be offended, my dear