luding Saturday
and have several lessons a week in the afternoon. New Years I dined
at the La Beaumes. There was just the immediate family and we were
twenty-three at table." (These were part of a French branch of the
relatives of Nelka on her mother's side.)

Paris 1900.

"I can understand people with no sentiment, but I will not tolerate
people who scoff at it."

"I am so glad to have the Russian church here. I go every Sunday."

Paris 1900.

"I don't have a minute to spare. This is what I wanted and the life
though very full is easy and tranquil. The free reality of thought
is delightful and wonderful. I do not include freedom of expression.
I wonder how much I fool myself? It is not an intolerance which
wishes to promote self but which is limited and dead to a variation
of its own species because it lacks the consciousness of its own
incompleteness. A man who does not wish to dominate and emphasize
his will upon his surroundings, including people, is not a whole man.
My Russian is getting on. I will be very glad when I have mastered
the language, then I am going to begin Italian."

As a child Nelka did not speak Russian and only started studying it
when grown up. When she later went to Russia she still was very weak
in the language and only gradually picked it up with practice, but
eventually knew it very well.

Paris 1900.

"How madly busy all the little people are, bussing over the planet,
and for what? How nice it is to go to sleep. I am going to bed.
P.S. I think it is an intellectual crime to wear long skirts in the
streets."

Paris 1900.

"One must be earnest or else laugh at everything and end in despair.
I am so satisfied with my present condition that I think it would be
foolish to upset it all after so short a time. I am just beginning to
feel the peaceful reaction of it all and I dread the idea of getting
roused again before having fully got hold of myself. The total
change I felt necessary proved a salvation and that complete absence
of all reminders of the past year is the only thing wherein I can get
quiet. I do not want to go over what I have felt. Suffice it to say
that I want to stay just as I am until after next winter when I will
feel like going back to America without regret. I do not feel equal
to any more emotions."

Paris 1900.

"I do not understand the 'variety of perfection.' I think it is
impossible and therefore absurd to try to preface for this life, well
up on our own