Naturally, the house was the first point which engaged our attention.  In 1860, Count Tolstoy, being then thirty-two years of age, made up his mind unalterably that he would never marry.  All the world knows that when the count has irrevocably determined upon anything he immediately furnishes substantial proof of his convictions.  On this occasion his demonstration took the form of selling the manor house, which was taken down and set up again on another estate in the same government by the purchaser.  The wings of the former house alone remained, detached buildings, such as were used in the olden days to accommodate the embroiderers, weavers, peasant musicians and actors of the private troupes kept by wealthy grandees, as a theatre, or as extra apartments.  The count occupied one of these wings.

Two years later, he changed his mind and married.  He brought his beautiful bride of half his age to this tiny wing,—­it chanced to be tiny in this case,—­and there she lived for seventeen years.  The horrible loneliness of it, especially in winter, with not a neighbor for miles, unless one reckon the village at the park gate, which could not have furnished anything but human beings, and never a congenial companion for her!  Needless to say that she never had on a low-bodied gown, never went to the theatre or a ball, in all her fair young life; and to the loneliness of the country must be added the absolute loneliness during the absences of the count, who had much reading to do in Moscow for the historical portions of his great war drama.  When he got tired of his village school, of his experiments upon the infant peasant mind, of things in general, he could and did go away for rest.  The countess did not.  Decidedly, the Countess Sophia Tolstoy is one of those truly feminine heroines who are cast into shadow by a brilliant light close to them, but a heroine none the less in more ways than need be mentioned.  Her self-denial and courage gave to the world “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenin;” and she declares that were it to do over again she would not hesitate a moment.  The public owes the count’s wife a great debt of gratitude, and not of reproaches, for bravely opposing his fatal desire to live in every detail the life of a peasant laborer.  Can any one blessed with the faintest particle of imagination fail to perceive how great a task it has been to withstand him thus for his own good; to rear nine healthy, handsome, well-bred children out of the much larger family which they have had; to bear the entire responsibility of the household and the business?

She remarked, one day, that there was no crying need for the Russian nobility to follow her husband’s teachings and give away all their goods in order to be on a level with the peasants.  Plenty of them would soon attain that blissful state of poverty in the natural course of things, since they were not only growing poorer every year, but the distribution of inheritances among the numerous children was completing