This, I think, came from a natural reserve, but also from a peculiar shyness. There are people who constitutionally cannot endure and are morbidly shy of too demonstrative attitudes, gestures and words, and Anton Pavlovitch possessed this quality in the highest degree. Herein, maybe, is hidden the key to his _seeming_ indifference towards question of struggle and protest and his aloofness towards topical events, which did and do agitate the Russian intelligentsia. He had a horror of pathos, of vehement emotions and the theatrical effects inseparable from them. I can only compare him in this with a man who loves a woman with all the ardor, tenderness and depth, of which a man of refinement and great intelligence is capable. He will never try to speak of it in pompous, high-flown words, and he cannot even imagine himself falling on his knees and pressing his hand to his heart and speaking in the tremulous voice of a young lover on the stage. And therefore he loves and is silent, and suffers in silence, and will never attempt to utter what the average man will express freely and noisily according to all the rules of rhetoric. VII To young writers, Chekhov was always sympathetic and kind. No one left him oppressed by his enormous talent and by one's own insignificance. He never said to any one: "Do as I do; see how I behave." If in despair one complained to him: "Is it worth going on, if one will forever remain 'our young and promising author'?" he answered quietly and seriously: --"But, my dear fellow, not every one can write like Tolstoy." His considerateness was at times pathetic. A certain young writer came to Yalta and took a little room in a big and noisy Greek family somewhere beyond Antka, on the outskirts of the city. He once complained to Chekhov that it was difficult to work in such surroundings, and Chekhov insisted that the writer should come to him in the mornings and work downstairs in the room adjoining the dining room. "You will write downstairs, and I upstairs"--he said with his charming smile--"And you will have dinner with me. When you finish something, do read it to me, or, if you go away, send me the proofs." He read an amazing amount and always remembered everything, and never confused one writer with another. If writers asked his opinion, he always praised their work, not so as to get rid of them, but because he knew how cruelly a sharp, even if just, criticism cuts the wings of beginners, and what an encouragement and hope a little praise gives sometimes. "I have read your story. It is marvelously well done," he would say on such occasions in a hearty voice. But when a certain confidence was established and they got to know each other, especially if an author insisted, he gave his opinion more definitely, directly, and at greater length. I have two letters of his, written to one and the same novelist, concerning one and the same tale. Here is a quotation from the first: