[27] To Gontcharenko, January 17, 1903 (ibid.).
[28] To a friend, November, 1901. (Correspondence).
[29] "It is like a crack in a pneumatic machine; all the vapour of egoism that we wish to drain from the human soul re-enters by it." He ingeniously strives to prove that the original text has been wrongly read; that the exact wording of the Second Commandment was in fact "Love thy neighbour as Himself (as God)." (Conversations with Teneromo.)
[30] Conversations with Teneromo.
[CHAPTER XVII]
OLD AGE
His face had taken on definite lines; had become as it will remain in the memory of men: the large countenance, crossed by the arch of a double furrow; the white, bristling eyebrows; the patriarchal beard, recalling that of the Moses of Dijon. The aged face was gentler and softer; it bore the traces of illness, of sorrow, of disappointment, and of affectionate kindness. What a change from the almost animal brutality of the same face at twenty, and the heavy rigidity of the soldier of Sebastopol! But the eyes have always the same profound fixity, the same look of loyalty, which hides nothing and from which nothing is hidden.
Nine years before his death, in his reply to the Holy Synod (April 17, 1901) Tolstoy had said: