especially impressed him, as he himself was heir to large estates.  His father had not been rich, but his mother had received 10,000 acres of land for her dowry.  At that time he fully realised all the cruelty and injustice of private property in land, and being one of those to whom a sacrifice to the demands of conscience gives the highest spiritual enjoyment, he decided not to retain property rights, but to give up to the peasant labourers the land he had inherited from his father.  It was on this land question he wrote his essay.

He arranged his life on his aunts’ estate in the following manner.  He got up very early, sometimes at three o’clock, and before sunrise went through the morning mists to bathe in the river, under the hill.  He returned while the dew still lay on the grass and the flowers.  Sometimes, having finished his coffee, he sat down with his books of reference and his papers to write his essay, but very often, instead of reading or writing, he left home again, and wandered through the fields and the woods.  Before dinner he lay down and slept somewhere in the garden.  At dinner he amused and entertained his aunts with his bright spirits, then he rode on horseback or went for a row on the river, and in the evening he again worked at his essay, or sat reading or playing patience with his aunts.

His joy in life was so great that it agitated him, and kept him awake many a night, especially when it was moonlight, so that instead of sleeping he wandered about in the garden till dawn, alone with his dreams and fancies.

And so, peacefully and happily, he lived through the first month of his stay with his aunts, taking no particular notice of their half-ward, half-servant, the black-eyed, quick-footed Katusha.  Then, at the age of nineteen, Nekhludoff, brought up under his mother’s wing, was still quite pure.  If a woman figured in his dreams at all it was only as a wife.  All the other women, who, according to his ideas he could not marry, were not women for him, but human beings.

But on Ascension Day that summer, a neighbour of his aunts’, and her family, consisting of two young daughters, a schoolboy, and a young artist of peasant origin who was staying with them, came to spend the day.  After tea they all went to play in the meadow in front of the house, where the grass had already been mown.  They played at the game of gorelki, and Katusha joined them.  Running about and changing partners several times, Nekhludoff caught Katusha, and she became his partner.  Up to this time he had liked Katusha’s looks, but the possibility of any nearer relations with her had never entered his mind.

“Impossible to catch those two,” said the merry young artist, whose turn it was to catch, and who could run very fast with his short, muscular legs.

“You!  And not catch us?” said Katusha.