The illness did not pass away. The situation between husband and wife became more and more painful. They loved one another; each had a profound esteem for the other; but it was impossible for them to understand one another. They strove to make mutual concessions, which became--as is usually the case--a form of mutual torment. Tolstoy forced himself to follow his family to Moscow. He wrote in his _Journal:_ "The most painful month of my life. Getting settled in Moscow. All are settling down. But when, then, will they begin to live? All this, not in order to live, but because other folk do the same. Unhappy people!"[2] During these days the Countess wrote: "Moscow. We shall have been here a month tomorrow. The first two weeks I cried every day, for Leo was not only sad, but absolutely broken. He did not sleep, he did not eat, at times even he wept; I thought I should go mad."[3] For a time they had to live their lives apart. They begged one another's pardon for causing mutual suffering. We see how they always loved each other. He writes to her: "You say, 'I love you, and you do not need my love.' It is the only thing I do need.... Your love causes me more gladness than anything in the world." But as soon as they are together again the same discord occurs. The Countess cannot share this religious mania which is now impelling Tolstoy to study Hebrew with a rabbi. "Nothing else interests him any longer. He is wasting his energies in foolishness. I cannot conceal my impatience."[4] She writes to him: "It can only sadden me that such intellectual energies should spend themselves in chopping wood, heating the samovar, and cobbling boots." She adds, with affectionate, half-ironical humour of a mother who watches a child playing a foolish game: "Finally, I have pacified myself with the Russian proverb: 'Let the child play as he will, so long as he doesn't cry.'"[5] Before the letter was posted she had a mental vision of her husband reading these lines, his kind, frank eyes saddened by their ironical tone; and she re-opened the letter, in an impulse of affection: "Quite suddenly I saw you so clearly, and I felt such a rush of tenderness for you 1 There is something in you so wise, so naive, so persevering, and it is all lit up by the radiance of goodness, and that look of yours which goes straight to the soul.... It is something that belongs to you alone." In this manner these two creatures who loved also tormented one another and were straightway stricken with wretchedness because of the pain they had the power to inflict but not the power to avoid. A situation with no escape, which lasted for nearly thirty years; which was to be terminated only by the flight across the steppes, in a moment of aberration, of the ancient Lear, with death already upon him.