“He had arrived at that conclusion, and he was right. Yet we went on living just as others did, and what was the result? I made a round of visits last year, to all my children except Peter. Well, what did I find? Were they happy? Still it was not possible to alter everything as he wanted. It was not for nothing that the first man fell and that sin came into the world.”
That was our last talk. “I have done a great deal of thinking in my loneliness,” she said; “indeed, I have done more than thinking; I have done some writing,” and she smiled at me with an air of embarrassment that gave her aged face a sweet, wistful expression. “I have put down my thoughts about all these things, or rather, the outcome of my experiences. I kept a diary before I was married, and afterwards too, for a time. But I gave it up later, when it all began, about ten years ago.” She did not say what had begun, but I knew that she meant the strained relations with her older children, the misunderstandings, and the contentions. She had had the entire control of the family estate after her husband’s death. “In looking through my possessions here I found my old diaries and reread them. There is a good deal in them that is silly, but there is a good deal that is good, and”—again the same smile—“instructive, too. I could not make up my mind at first whether to burn them or not, so I asked Father Nicodim, and he said, ‘Burn them.’ But that was all nonsense, you know. He could not understand. So I didn’t burn them.” How well I recognised her characteristic illogical consistency. She was obedient to Father Nicodim in most things, and had settled near the monastery to be under his guidance; but when she thought that his judgment was irrational, she did what seemed best to her.
“Not only did I not burn them, I wrote two more volumes. There is nothing to do here, so I wrote what I thought about it all, and when I die—I don’t mean to die yet: my mother lived to be seventy, and my father eighty—but when I do die these books are to be sent to you. You are to read them and to decide whether there is anything of real value in