_August 20._--An outburst against me at dinner.... The sense of peace and welfare had got hold of the family. Every one depressed ... painful conversation in the house. Sonya, feeling that she was to blame tried to justify herself by anger. I was sorry for her. _August 21._--In the morning began a conversation, hotly too but well. I said what ought to be said.... I came home. Sonya was reconciled. How glad I was. Certainly if she would take to being good she would be very good. _September 3._--Something touches them somehow ... but I don't know how. _September 7._--Went looking for mushrooms ... my wife did not follow me but went off by herself not knowing where, only not after me--that is all our life. _September 9._--It is pleasant being with my wife. Told her unpleasant truths and she was not angry. _September 10._--Sonya tidied my room and then shouted disgustingly at Vlass. I am training myself to abstain from indignation and to see in it a moral bump which one must recognise as a fact and face its existence in one's action. _September 15._--Went to look for mushrooms. Miserable. _September 17._--Talk in the morning. And sudden fury. Then she came to me and nagged until I was beside myself. I said nothing and did nothing, but I was very unhappy. She ran away in hysterics, I ran after her, horribly worried. * * * * After this diary of 1884 no diaries so far as I know were left by Leo Nikolaevitch for several years. Did he cease to keep his diary that he might not increase his spiritual sufferings by recording them on paper, preferring to continue his intense struggle with himself in complete solitude before no one but his God? Did he keep a diary and afterwards himself destroy it, not wishing to reveal to anyone the sufferings to which he was subjected? Were the missing diaries lost in some other way, if indeed they ever existed? To these questions there is no answer, and it is hardly likely there will be. By Leo Nikolaevitch's notes in his later diaries kept from the year 1888, one thing is placed beyond doubt, that is, that his spiritual sufferings and inward struggles in connection with his family relations continued the whole of the rest of his life. And in this struggle his higher consciousness became brighter and brighter, his spiritual force grew and gained strength. As the years passed he gained an amazing mastery of his personal desires and weaknesses. At times, as indeed was inevitable, he recognised with peculiar pain his complete loneliness in the midst of the people surrounding him. To what degree he felt himself a stranger in his own family, how completely he was deprived of that warm, genuine sympathy on the part of his wife which is the most precious thing in married life, can to some extent be judged by the notes in which, with irrepressible grief, he recalls his mother.