Thinking it over, later on, while I walked slowly away from the Boulevard des Philosophes, I asked myself critically, what precisely was it that she wanted to know?  What I had heard of her history was enough to give me a clue.  In the educational establishment for girls where Miss Haldin finished her studies she was looked upon rather unfavourably.  She was suspected of holding independent views on matters settled by official teaching.  Afterwards, when the two ladies returned to their country place, both mother and daughter, by speaking their minds openly on public events, had earned for themselves a reputation of liberalism.  The three-horse trap of the district police-captain began to be seen frequently in their village.  “I must keep an eye on the peasants”—­so he explained his visits up at the house.  “Two lonely ladies must be looked after a little.”  He would inspect the walls as though he wanted to pierce them with his eyes, peer at the photographs, turn over the books in the drawing-room negligently, and after the usual refreshments, would depart.  But the old priest of the village came one evening in the greatest distress and agitation, to confess that he—­the priest—­had been ordered to watch and ascertain in other ways too (such as using his spiritual power with the servants) all that was going on in the house, and especially in respect of the visitors these ladies received, who they were, the length of their stay, whether any of them were strangers to that part of the country, and so on.  The poor, simple old man was in an agony of humiliation and terror.  “I came to warn you.  Be cautious in your conduct, for the love of God.  I am burning with shame, but there is no getting out from under the net.  I shall have to tell them what I see, because if I did not there is my deacon.  He would make the worst of things to curry favour.  And then my son-in-law, the husband of my Parasha, who is a writer in the Government Domain office; they would soon kick him out—­and maybe send him away somewhere.”  The old man lamented the necessities of the times—­“when people do not agree somehow” and wiped his eyes.  He did not wish to spend the evening of his days with a shaven head in the penitent’s cell of some monastery—­“and subjected to all the severities of ecclesiastical discipline; for they would show no mercy to an old man,” he groaned.  He became almost hysterical, and the two ladies, full of commiseration, soothed him the best they could before they let him go back to his cottage.  But, as a matter of fact, they had very few visitors.  The neighbours—­some of them old friends—­began to keep away; a few from timidity, others with marked disdain, being grand people that came only for the summer—­Miss Haldin explained to me—­aristocrats, reactionaries.  It was a solitary existence for a young girl.  Her relations with her mother were of the tenderest and most open kind; but Mrs. Haldin had seen the experiences of her own generation, its sufferings, its deceptions, its apostasies too.