"I carefully picked up the flower that had fallen in the mud, and, going back to the drawing-room, laid it on the table before her chair. "And now at last she came back, and with light footsteps, crossing the whole room, sat down at the table. "Her face was both paler and more vivid; her downcast eyes, that looked somehow smaller, strayed rapidly in happy confusion from side to side. "She saw the rose, snatched it up, glanced at its crushed, muddy petals, glanced at me, and her eyes, brought suddenly to a standstill, were bright with tears. "'What are you crying for?' I asked. "'Why, see this rose. Look what has happened to it.' "Then I thought fit to utter a profound remark. "'Your tears will wash away the mud,' I pronounced with a significant expression. "'Tears do not wash, they burn,' she answered. And turning to the hearth she flung the rose into the dying flame. "'Fire burns even better than tears,' she cried with spirit; and her lovely eyes, still bright with tears, laughed boldly and happily. "I saw that she, too, had been through the fire." A few of the _Poems in Prose_, profoundly ironical, as "The Fool," "A Contented Man," "The Egoist," "A Rule of Life," "Two Strangers," "The Workmen and the Man with the White Hands," show the indignation of a large generous heart with human baseness, pettiness, stupidity, and envy. A minority of the poems are instinct with Turgenev's morbid apprehension of death's stealthy approach, and the final, unescapable blotting out of life and love by his clutch. Turgenev's dread of the malignant forces of decay and dissolution had found powerful expression nearly twenty years earlier in _Phantoms_, where a series of prose poems is enshrined in the setting of a story. "'Do not utter her name, not her name,' Alice faltered hurriedly. 'We must escape, or there will be an end to everything and for ever.... Look over there!' "I turned my head in the direction in which her trembling hand was pointing and discerned something ... horrible indeed.