loved' is inexact.

"I loved Nikolenka, but I admired Seryozha as something alien and
incomprehensible to me. It was a human life very beautiful, but
completely incomprehensible to me, mysterious, and therefore especially
attractive.

"He died only a few days ago, and while he was ill and while he was
dying he was just as inscrutable and just as dear to me as he had been
in the distant days of our childhood.

"In these latter days, in our old age, he was fonder of me, valued my
attachment more, was prouder of me, wanted to agree with me, but could
not, and remained just the same as he had always been; namely, something
quite apart, only himself, handsome, aristocratic, proud, and, above
all, truthful and sincere to a degree that I never met in any other man.

"He was what he was; he concealed nothing, and did not wish to appear
anything different."

Uncle Seryozha never treated children affectionately; on the contrary,
he seemed to put up with us rather than to like us. But we always
treated him with particular reverence. The result, as I can see now,
partly of his aristocratic appearance, but chiefly because of the fact
that he called my father "Lyovotchka" and treated him just as my father
treated us.

He was not only not in the least afraid of him, but was always teasing
him, and argued with him like an elder person with a younger. We were
quite alive to this.

Of course every one knew that there were no faster dogs in the world
than our black-and-white Darling and her daughter Wizard. Not a hare
could get away from them. But Uncle Seryozha said that the gray hares
about us were sluggish creatures, not at all the same thing as steppe
hares, and neither Darling nor Wizard would get near a steppe hare.

We listened with open mouths, and did not know which to believe, papa or
Uncle Seryozha.

Uncle Seryozha went out coursing with us one day. A number of gray
hares were run down, not one, getting away; Uncle Seryozha expressed
no surprise, but still maintained that the only reason was because they
were a poor lot of hares. We could not tell whether he was right or
wrong.

Perhaps, after all, he was right, for he was more of a sportsman than
papa and had run down ever so many wolves, while we had never known papa
run any wolves down.

Afterward papa kept dogs only because there was Agafya Mikhailovna to be
thought of, and Uncle Seryozha gave up sport because it was impossible
to keep dogs.

"Since the ema