One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Voltchaninovs about nine o clock in the morning.  I walked about the park, keeping a good distance from the house, looking for white mushrooms, of which there was a great number that summer, and noting their position so as to come and pick them afterwards with Genya.  There was a warm breeze.  I saw Genya and her mother both in light holiday dresses coming home from church, Genya holding her hat in the wind.  Afterwards I heard them having tea on the terrace.

For a careless person like me, trying to find justification for my perpetual idleness, these holiday mornings in our country-houses in the summer have always had a particular charm.  When the green garden, still wet with dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks radiant with happiness, when there is a scent of mignonette and oleander near the house, when the young people have just come back from church and are having breakfast in the garden, all so charmingly dressed and gay, and one knows that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people are going to do nothing the whole long day, one wishes that all life were like that.  Now, too, I had the same thought, and walked about the garden prepared to walk about like that, aimless and unoccupied, the whole day, the whole summer.

Genya came out with a basket; she had a look in her face as though she knew she would find me in the garden, or had a presentiment of it.  We gathered mushrooms and talked, and when she asked a question she walked a little ahead so as to see my face.

“A miracle happened in the village yesterday,” she said.  “The lame woman Pelagea has been ill the whole year.  No doctors or medicines did her any good; but yesterday an old woman came and whispered something over her, and her illness passed away.”

“That’s nothing much,” I said.  “You mustn’t look for miracles only among sick people and old women.  Isn’t health a miracle?  And life itself?  Whatever is beyond understanding is a miracle.”

“And aren’t you afraid of what is beyond understanding?”

“No.  Phenomena I don’t understand I face boldly, and am not overwhelmed by them.  I am above them.  Man ought to recognise himself as superior to lions, tigers, stars, superior to everything in nature, even what seems miraculous and is beyond his understanding, or else he is not a man, but a mouse afraid of everything.”

Genya believed that as an artist I knew a very great deal, and could guess correctly what I did not know.  She longed for me to initiate her into the domain of the Eternal and the Beautiful—­into that higher world in which, as she imagined, I was quite at home.  And she talked to me of God, of the eternal life, of the miraculous.  And I, who could never admit that my self and my imagination would be lost forever after death, answered:  “Yes, men are immortal”; “Yes, there is eternal life in store for us.”  And she listened, believed, and did not ask for proofs.