I leaned over and spoke to it.  I asked it if my heart would ever know love.  It said it thought so.

On the way home I passed an onion.

It lay upon the road.

Someone had stepped upon its stem and crushed it.  How it must have suffered.  I placed it in my bosom.  All night it lay beside my pillow.

* * *

Another Day.

My heart is yearning for love!  How is it that I can love no one?

I have tried and I cannot.  My father—­Ivan Ivanovitch—­he is so big and so kind, and yet I cannot love him; and my mother, Katoosha Katooshavitch, she is just as big, and yet I cannot love her.  And my brother, Dimitri Dimitrivitch, I cannot love him.

And Alexis Alexovitch!

I cannot love him.  And yet I am to marry him.  They have set the day.  It is a month from to-day.  One month.  Thirty days.  Why cannot I love Alexis?  He is tall and strong.  He is a soldier.  He is in the Guard of the Czar, Nicholas Romanoff, and yet I cannot love him.

* * *

Next Day but one.

How they cramp and confine me here—­Ivan Ivanovitch my father, and my mother (I forget her name for the minute), and all the rest.

I cannot breathe.

They will not let me.

Every time I try to commit suicide they hinder me.

Last night I tried again.

I placed a phial of sulphuric acid on the table beside my bed.

In the morning it was still there.

It had not killed me.

They have forbidden me to drown myself.

Why!

I do not know why?  In vain I ask the air and the trees why I should not drown myself?  They do not see any reason why.

And yet I long to be free, free as the young birds, as the very youngest of them.

I watch the leaves blowing in the wind and I want to be a leaf.

Yet here they want to make me eat!

Yesterday I ate a banana!  Ugh!

* * *

Next Day.

To-day in my walk I found a cabbage.

It lay in a corner of the hedge.  Cruel boys had chased it there with stones.

It was dead when I lifted it up.

Beside it was an egg.

It too was dead.  Ah, how I wept—­

* * *

This Morning.

How my heart beats.  To-day A MAN passed.  He passed: 
actually passed.

From my window I saw him go by the garden gate and out into the meadow beside the river where my Tchupvskja flower is growing!

How beautiful he looked!  Not tall like Alexis Alexovitch, ah, no! but so short and wide and round—­shaped like the beautiful cabbage that died last week.

He wore a velvet jacket and he carried a camp stool and an easel on his back, and in his face was a curved pipe with a long stem, and his face was not red and rough like the face of Alexis, but mild and beautiful and with a smile that played on it like moonlight over putty.