With a finger tapping upon the mouldy, gnarled old oaken stump on which we are sitting, she adds:
"The Cossacks, for instance, live comfortably enough; yet I do not like them."
"What in them is it that displeases you?"
"Somehow they repel me. True, much of everything is theirs; yet also they have ways which alienate me."
Unable any longer to conceal from her my pity, I say gently:
"Never, I fear, will you discover what you are seeking."
She shakes her head protestingly.
"And never ought a woman to be discouraged," she retorts. "Woman's proper round is to wish for a child, and to nurse it, and, when it has been weaned, to get herself ready to have another one. That is how woman should live. She should live as pass spring and summer, autumn and winter."
I find it a pleasure to watch the play of the woman's intellectual features; and though, also, I long to take her in my arms, I feel that my better plan will be to seek once more the quiet, empty steppe, and, bearing in me the recollection of this woman, to resume my lonely journey towards the region where the silver wall of the mountains merges with the sky, and the dark ravines gape at the steppe with their chilly jaws. At the moment, however, I cannot so do, for the Cossacks have temporarily deprived me of my passport.
"What are you yourself seeking?" she asks suddenly as again she edges towards me.