He said this more than once and at some length.  I did not like to enter on the subject lest he should go too far, in his earnestness, before the assembled company.  Therefore I seized an opportunity to ask his wife how he reconciled that remark with his creed that all women should marry.

She answered that it certainly was not consistent, but that her husband changed his opinion every two years; and, to my consternation, she instantly appealed to him.  He did not go into details, however.  He pulled out a letter which he had received from a Russian woman, a stranger to him.  The writer said:  “While acknowledging the justice of your views, I must remark that marriage is a fate which is not possible to every woman.  What, then, in your opinion, should a woman who has missed that fate do?”

I was interested in his reply, because six months earlier he had advised me to marry.  I inquired what answer he intended to send,—­that is, if he meant to reply at all.  He said that he considered the letter of sufficient importance to merit an answer, and that he should tell her that “every woman who had not married, whatever the reason, ought to impose upon herself the hardest cross which she could devise, and bear it.”

“And so punish herself for the fault of others, perhaps?” I asked.  “No.  If your correspondent is a woman of sufficient spirit to impose that cross, she will also have sufficient spirit to retort that very few of us choose our own crosses; and that women’s crosses imposed by Fate, Providence, or whatever one pleases to call it, are generally heavier, more cruel, than any which they could imagine for themselves in the maddest ecstasy of pain-worship.  Are the Shaker women, of whom you approve, also to invent crosses?  And how about the Shaker men?  What is their duty in the matter of invoking suffering?”

He made no reply, except that “non-marriage was the ideal state,” and then relapsed into silence, as was his habit when he did not intend to relinquish his idea.  Nevertheless I am convinced he is always open to the influence—­quite unconsciously, of course—­of argument from any quarter.  His changes of belief prove it.

These remarks anent the Shakers seemed to indicate that another change was imminent; and as the history of his progress through the links of his chain of reasoning was a subject of the greatest interest to me, I asked his wife for it.  It cannot be called anything but a linked progress, since the germs—­nay, the nearly full-fledged idea—­of his present moral and religious attitude can be found in almost all of his writings from the very beginning.

When the count married, he had attained to that familiar stage in the spiritual life where men have forgotten, or outgrown, or thoroughly neglected for a long time the religious instruction inculcated upon them in their childhood.  There is no doubt that the count had been well grounded in religious tenets and ceremonies; the Russian church is particular on this point, and examinations in “the law of God” form part of the conditions for entrance to the state schools.  But, having reached the point where religion has no longer any solid grasp upon a man, he did not like to see other people observe even the forms.