The westerner in me was discomposed.  There was something shocking in the expression of that face.  Had I been myself a conspirator, a Russian political refugee, I could have perhaps been able to draw some practical conclusion from this chance glimpse.  As it was, it only discomposed me strongly, even to the extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in regard to Natalia Haldin.  All this is rather inexplicable, but such was the origin of the purpose I formed there and then to call on these ladies in the evening, after my solitary dinner.  It was true that I had met Miss Haldin only a few hours before, but Mrs. Haldin herself I had not seen for some considerable time.  The truth is, I had shirked calling of late.

Poor Mrs. Haldin!  I confess she frightened me a little.  She was one of those natures, rare enough, luckily, in which one cannot help being interested, because they provoke both terror and pity.  One dreads their contact for oneself, and still more for those one cares for, so clear it is that they are born to suffer and to make others suffer, too.  It is strange to think that, I won’t say liberty, but the mere liberalism of outlook which for us is a matter of words, of ambitions, of votes (and if of feeling at all, then of the sort of feeling which leaves our deepest affections untouched), may be for other beings very much like ourselves and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of fortitude, a matter of tears and anguish and blood.  Mrs. Haldin had felt the pangs of her own generation.  There was that enthusiast brother of hers—­the officer they shot under Nicholas.  A faintly ironic resignation is no armour for a vulnerable heart.  Mrs. Haldin, struck at through her children, was bound to suffer afresh from the past, and to feel the anguish of the future.  She was of those who do not know how to heal themselves, of those who are too much aware of their heart, who, neither cowardly nor selfish, look passionately at its wounds—­and count the cost.

Such thoughts as these seasoned my modest, lonely bachelor’s meal.  If anybody wishes to remark that this was a roundabout way of thinking of Natalia Haldin, I can only retort that she was well worth some concern.  She had all her life before her.  Let it be admitted, then, that I was thinking of Natalia Haldin’s life in terms of her mother’s character, a manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old yet to have become a stranger to pity.  There was almost all her youth before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy, overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly sombre youth given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious antagonisms.

I lingered over my thoughts more than I should have done.  One felt so helpless, and even worse—­so unrelated, in a way.  At the last moment I hesitated as to going there at all.  What was the good?

The evening was already advanced when, turning into the Boulevard des Philosophes, I saw the light in the window at the corner.  The blind was down, but I could imagine behind it Mrs. Haldin seated in the chair, in her usual attitude, looking out for some one, which had lately acquired the poignant quality of mad expectation.