“Yes, go, go,” said he; “God bless you.  Yes.  I’ll come again to-morrow, and we will decide.  Good-bye, my darling—­good-bye.”  Again he found it hard to swallow the lump in his throat.

When Michael Ivanovich returned to his brother’s house, Alexandra Dmitrievna immediately rushed to him.

“Well?”

“Well?  Nothing.”

“Have you seen?” she asked, guessing from his expression that something had happened.

“Yes,” he answered shortly, and began to cry.  “I’m getting old and stupid,” said he, mastering his emotion.

“No; you are growing wise—­very wise.”

THERE ARE NO GUILTY PEOPLE

I

Mine is a strange and wonderful lot!  The chances are that there is not a single wretched beggar suffering under the luxury and oppression of the rich who feels anything like as keenly as I do either the injustice, the cruelty, and the horror of their oppression of and contempt for the poor; or the grinding humiliation and misery which befall the great majority of the workers, the real producers of all that makes life possible.  I have felt this for a long time, and as the years have passed by the feeling has grown and grown, until recently it reached its climax.  Although I feel all this so vividly, I still live on amid the depravity and sins of rich society; and I cannot leave it, because I have neither the knowledge nor the strength to do so.  I cannot.  I do not know how to change my life so that my physical needs—­food, sleep, clothing, my going to and fro—­may be satisfied without a sense of shame and wrongdoing in the position which I fill.

There was a time when I tried to change my position, which was not in harmony with my conscience; but the conditions created by the past, by my family and its claims upon me, were so complicated that they would not let me out of their grasp, or rather, I did not know how to free myself.  I had not the strength.  Now that I am over eighty and have become feeble, I have given up trying to free myself; and, strange to say, as my feebleness increases I realise more and more strongly the wrongfulness of my position, and it grows more and more intolerable to me.

It has occurred to me that I do not occupy this position for nothing:  that Providence intended that I should lay bare the truth of my feelings, so that I might atone for all that causes my suffering, and might perhaps open the eyes of those—­or at least of some of those—­who are still blind to what I see so clearly, and thus might lighten the burden of that vast majority who, under existing conditions, are subjected to bodily and spiritual suffering by those who deceive them and also deceive themselves.  Indeed, it may be that the position which I occupy gives me special facilities for revealing the artificial and criminal relations which exist between men—­for telling the whole truth