which, they maintain, eats tallow candle for a delicacy.  As to the woman, the French woman, well, though I have also been in France with a hundred thousand Russians, I have never seen her.  Very likely she was not in Paris then.  And in any case hers were not the doors that would fly open before simple fellows of my sort, you understand.  Gilded salons were never in my way.  I could not tell you how she looked, which is strange considering that I was, if I may say so, Tomassov’s special confidant.

“He very soon got shy of talking before the others.  I suppose the usual camp-fire comments jarred his fine feelings.  But I was left to him and truly I had to submit.  You can’t very well expect a youngster in Tomassov’s state to hold his tongue altogether; and I—­I suppose you will hardly believe me—­I am by nature a rather silent sort of person.

“Very likely my silence appeared to him sympathetic.  All the month of September our regiment, quartered in villages, had come in for an easy time.  It was then that I heard most of that—­you can’t call it a story.  The story I have in my mind is not in that.  Outpourings, let us call them.

“I would sit quite content to hold my peace, a whole hour perhaps, while Tomassov talked with exaltation.  And when he was done I would still hold my peace.  And then there would be produced a solemn effect of silence which, I imagine, pleased Tomassov in a way.

“She was of course not a woman in her first youth.  A widow, maybe.  At any rate I never heard Tomassov mention her husband.  She had a salon, something very distinguished; a social centre in which she queened it with great splendour.

“Somehow, I fancy her court was composed mostly of men.  But Tomassov, I must say, kept such details out of his discourses wonderfully well.  Upon my word I don’t know whether her hair was dark or fair, her eyes brown or blue; what was her stature, her features, or her complexion.  His love soared above mere physical impressions.  He never described her to me in set terms; but he was ready to swear that in her presence everybody’s thoughts and feelings were bound to circle round her.  She was that sort of woman.  Most wonderful conversations on all sorts of subjects went on in her salon:  but through them all there flowed unheard like a mysterious strain of music the assertion, the power, the tyranny of sheer beauty.  So apparently the woman was beautiful.  She detached all these talking people from their life interests, and even from their vanities.  She was a secret delight and a secret trouble.  All the men when they looked at her fell to brooding as if struck by the thought that their lives had been wasted.  She was the very joy and shudder of felicity and she brought only sadness and torment to the hearts of men.

“In short, she must have been an extraordinary woman, or else Tomassov was an extraordinary young fellow to feel in that way and to talk like this about her.  I told you the fellow had a lot of poetry in him and observed that all this sounded true enough.  It would be just about the sorcery a woman very much out of the common would exercise, you know.  Poets do get close to truth somehow—­there is no denying that.