“Life is going to be good,” he wrote. “I have not known till now what possibilities it held, what wisdom there was in men, what beauty. All will begin again when I come back to Mother-of-God village” (the place where his land is situated). “I want to re-read all our poets. Their voices are going to sound again. Do you know Solovyof? He is wise and tender and beautiful. When I come back I will not stray from Mother-of-God village, not to Petrograd or to Moscow. But we will sit together and read Solovyof; you shall read him aloud to me and I will be content....” “Ah, but I dread that,” said the Countess. “I should not want to sit and read Solovyof. I want to live for my boy at least. We cannot go on living here if my boy is to be educated properly. But then--you know what Tolstoy said to women, ‘Never use your influence with your husbands to make them act contrary to their convictions.’ Do you agree to that? I do not. I use all the influence I have. “Life has been a great disillusion for me. It promised so much. Once I used to think there was nothing more wonderful than what life was going to bring. Now I see it is empty. There is nothing coming. Then the war goes on from week to week and month to month, interminably and without any gleam of hope of an end. It is very well to say the war will end by Christmas, next Christmas next again. I do not believe it. My boy is thirteen, delicate, enthusiastic, excitable, and already he is experiencing the emotion of love. He lost his heart lately to one of his cousins. She is twenty and is somewhat amused. The other day he picked up my hand and kissed it, which was somewhat unusual, and I turned to him. There were tears in his eyes and he looked up at me and said, ‘Ah, mother, how sorry I am it is not Vera’s hand.’ Galling, was it not?” The Countess, for all her inward sadness and her deafness, was extremely vivacious, and when she did not hear she imagined what you said and was very often right. “I am sorry if sometimes I do not hear,” she said. “Teach me to speak to you so that you will hear,” said I, which is a simple sentence but a suggestive thought. An interesting and sad time I spent with the Countess. Her quiet tragedy, that of being robbed of a husband and robbed of precious time, is part of the great universal tragedy of war, which touches rich and poor alike, simple and noble. The war has come athwart many promising lives in this generation and robbed the whole of the past and of the future of all mortal significance. Still, it has also given spiritual treasure in the heart, in the soul, hidden treasure--that is what we must not overlook. A letter which I have just received from the poor prisoner gives the following thoughts: