I had known Marie Alexandrovna ever since we were children. As so often happens with young people, there was no suggestion of lovemaking about our companionship, with the possible exception of one evening when she was at our house and we played “Ladies and Gentlemen.” She was fifteen, with plump, rosy hands, beautiful dark eyes, and a thick plait of black hair. I was so impressed by her during that evening that I imagined that I was in love with her. But that was the only time; during all the rest of our forty years’ acquaintance we were on those excellent terms of friendship which exist between a man and a woman who mutually respect each other, which are so delightful when—as in our case—they are free from any idea of lovemaking.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of our friendship, and it taught me a great deal. I have never known a woman who more perfectly typified the good wife, the good mother. Through her I learned much, and came to understand many things.
I saw her for the last time last year, only a month before her death, which neither of us expected. She had just settled down to live alone with Barbara, her cook, in the grounds of a monastery. It was very strange to see this mother of eight children—this woman who had nearly fifty grandchildren—living alone in that way. But there was an evident finality about her determination to live by herself for the rest of her days in spite of the more or less sincere invitations of her family. As I knew her to be, I will not say a freethinker, for she never laid any stress on that, but one who thought for herself with courage and common sense, I was puzzled at first to see her taking up her abode in the precincts of a monastery.
I knew that her heart was too full of real feeling to have any room for superstition, and I was well aware of her hatred of hypocrisy and of