"I feel in all my being," he wrote to Teneromo, "the truth of these words: that the husband and the wife are not separate beings, but are as one.... I wish most earnestly that I had the power to transmit to my wife a portion of that religious conscience which gives me the possibility of sometimes raising myself above the sorrows of life. I hope that it will be given her; very probably not by me, but by God, although this conscience is hardly accessible to women."[15] It seems that this wish was never gratified. Countess Tolstoy loved and admired the purity of heart, the candid heroism, and the goodness of the great man who was "as one" with her; she saw that "he marched ahead of the host and showed men the way they should follow";[16] when the Holy Synod excommunicated him she bravely undertook his defence and insisted on sharing the danger which threatened him. But she could not force herself to believe what she did not believe; and Tolstoy was too sincere to urge her to pretend--he who loathed the petty deceits of faith and love even more than the negation of faith and love.[17] How then could he constrain her, not believing, to modify her life, to sacrifice her fortune and that of her children? With his children the rift was wider still. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who saw Tolstoy with his family at Yasnaya Polyana, says that "at table, when the father was speaking, the sons barely concealed their weariness and unbelief."[18] His faith had only slightly affected two or three of his daughters, of whom one, Marie, was dead. He was morally isolated in the heart of his family. "He had scarcely any one but his youngest daughter and his doctor"[19] to understand him. He suffered from this mental loneliness; and he suffered from the social relations which were forced upon him; the reception of fatiguing visitors from every quarter of the globe; Americans, and the idly curious, who wore him out; he suffered from the "luxury" in which his family life forced him to live. It was a modest luxury, if we are to believe the accounts of those who saw him in his simple house, with its almost austere appointments; in his little room, with its iron bed, its cheap chairs, and its naked walls! But even this poor comfort weighed upon him; it was a cause of perpetual remorse. In the second of the tales published by the _Mercure de France_ he bitterly contrasts the spectacle of the poverty about him with the luxury of his own house. "My activity," he wrote as early as 1903, "however useful it may appear to certain people, loses the greater part of its importance by the fact that my life is not entirely in agreement with my professions."[20]