His dream was a happy hearth and home and a large family, and yet he never married. Perhaps the reason of this might have been found in the pure and sacred image of his mother, with which he unconsciously compared all other women to their detriment; also a little in the fact that he was inclined to be proud and suspicious. He rarely went to Petrograd, and the provincial young ladies whom he met in S⸺ were far too frankly in ecstasies before his wealth and brilliant position. Gzhatski was never happy abroad, and now deeply regretted that, after an attack of inflammation of the lungs caught during an autumn hunt, his doctors had persuaded him to pass the rest of the winter in Italy. In spite of the mutual impertinences they had exchanged at their first meeting, Irene had not displeased Gzhatski, and, seeing her a few days later on the Corso, he approached her with a friendly greeting. Irene was so touched by this absence of rancour, that, wishing to destroy the unpleasant impression of their previous conversation, she invited him to come and see her. Two days later Gzhatski availed himself of her invitation, and, in the good old provincial Russian fashion, stayed three hours! He told Irene all about his estate and about the other S⸺ landowners, and expressed his horror at the indecent haste with which many of them, frightened by the recent “revolution,” had sold their ancestral estates and moved to Petrograd. “I say nothing,” he remarked, “of the fact that their children will be penniless, since they will very quickly lose their newly acquired money in all sorts of doubtful speculations; our landowners are proverbially credulous and unbusinesslike! But the principal trouble is that these ruined children will, in addition, have lost the ties which bound them to our soil—and it is my firm belief that one can only be a true patriot if one has lived from childhood on one’s own land and among one’s own people, and has stored in one’s heart all the charming recollections and associations of an early youth spent in one’s ancestral country home. Even now, when after a long absence I approach my little station, my heart beats, and I recognize with joy, almost with tenderness, the station officials, my coachman, my _troika_.[1] It is all near and dear to me; the woods, the fields, the peasants who greet me smilingly, and who have known and loved me all my life. How much that is sacred breathes in memories of childhood, and how sad life must be when they are absent! I think, for instance, that if you, Irene Pavlovna, had in your heart the remembrance of some modest little village church where you prayed as a child, you would never have dreamt of betraying the faith of your childhood; you would never even have formulated your vague, cosmopolitan belief in Christ, a belief that certainly cannot give you happiness.”