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By Root 2320 0

years passed, it all seemed child’s play in comparison with that far-away love taken for its own by stern and uncompromising life. You heard no laughter and kisses there, nor pensive conversations, quivering with suppressed passion, in the summer-house among the flowers at the festival of nature and life…. All that had ‘withered and gone’. But that unfailing and indestructible love could be perceived in their faces as powerful as the life-force – at the time of common sorrow it shone in the slowly and silently exchanged glance of mutual suffering, and it could be felt in the infinite patience with which they met life’s torments, in their restrained tears and stifled sobs. Other dreams, distant, but clear, definite, and menacing, quietly replaced Olga’s vague sadness and questionings…. Under the influence of the reassuring and calm words of her husband, and in the boundless trust she felt in him, Olga relaxed from her mysterious sadness, which only few people know, and the stern and prophetic dreams of the future, and she went cheerfully forward. The ‘fog’ gave place to a bright and sunny morning, with the cares of a mother and a housewife; she felt drawn now to the flower-garden and the fields and now to her husband’s study. But no longer did she play about with life in careless abandon; instead she took heart of grace and, inspired by a secret thought, prepared herself, and waited…. She was growing in grace…. Andrey saw that his former ideal of woman and wife was unattainable, but he was happy even in the pale reflection of it in Olga: he had never expected even that. Meanwhile he, too, was faced for years, for almost his whole life, with the not inconsiderable task of maintaining his dignity as a man on the same high level in the eyes of a woman so proud and with so proper a regard for her own self-respect as Olga, not out of vulgar jealousy, but so as to make sure that her life, which was clear as crystal, should not be darkened; and this might well happen if her faith in him were in the least shaken.

A great many women have no need of anything of the kind: once married, they resignedly accept their husband’s good and bad qualities, reconcile themselves completely to the position and environment into which they have been placed, or as resignedly succumb to the first casual infatuation, finding it at once impossible or unnecessary to resist it. ‘It is fate,’ they say to themselves, ‘passion – woman is a weak creature,’ and so on. Even if the husband ranks above the crowd in intelligence, which is so irresistible an attraction in a man, such women pride themselves on their husband’s superiority as though it were some expensive necklace, and even then only if his intellect remains blind to their pitiful female tricks. But if he dares to see through the petty comedy of their sly, worthless, and sometimes vicious existence, they find his intellect hard and cramping.

Olga did not know this logic of resignation to blind fate and could not understand women’s cheap passions and infatuations. Having once recognized the worth in her chosen man and his claims on her, she believed in him and therefore loved him, and if she ceased to believe, she would cease to love, as had been the case with Oblomov. But at that time her steps were still unsteady and her will shaky; she was only just beginning to observe life closely and meditate on it, to become conscious of her mind and character and to gather her materials. The work of creative endeavour had not yet begun and she had not yet decided on her path in life. But now her faith in Andrey was not blind but conscious, and her ideal of masculine perfection was embodied in it. The more deeply and more consciously she believed in him, the harder he found it to remain on the same height and to be the hero not only of her mind and heart but also of her imagination. But her faith in him was so strong that she recognized no intermediary between herself and him or any other court of appeal than God. That was why she would not have put up with the slightest lowering in the qualities she acknowledged