University of Virginia Library

XXXV

At times he gives one the impression of having just arrived from some distant country, where people think and feel differently and their relations and language are different. He sits in a corner tired and gray, as though the dust of another earth were on him, and he looks attentively at everything with the look of a foreigner or of a dumb man. Yesterday, before dinner, he came into the drawing-room, just like that, his thoughts far away. He sat down on the sofa, and, after a moment's silence, suddenly said, swaying his body a little, rubbing the palm of his hand on his knee, and wrinkling up his face:

"Still that is not all — not all."

Some one, always stolidly stupid as a flat-iron, asked: "What do you say?"

He looked at him fixedly, and then, bending forward and looking onto the terrace where I was sitting with Doctor Nikitin and

Yelpatievsky, he said: "What are you talking about?"

"Plehve."

"Plehve . . . Plehve . . ." he repeated musingly after a pause, as though he heard the name for the first time. Then he shook himself, like a bird, and asked with a faint smile:

"To-day from early morning I have had a silly thing running in my head; some one once told me that he saw the following epitaph in a cemetery:

and something like that. . . ." He was silent, and then, nodding his head and smiling faintly, added: "In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very

touching, even beautiful. . . . There always is."

They called us to come to dinner.