indebted to him, and I
shall never forget his merry eyes, his fun. And I shall always feel
the effect of his ideas upon me in the time of my doubts--I love him!"

She spoke in a moderated voice, with a melancholy smile in her eyes.
But the incomprehensible fire of her gaze was not extinguished; her
exultation was apparent to everybody.

People love their own feelings--sometimes the very feelings that are
harmful to them--are enamored of them, and often derive keen pleasure
even from grief, a pleasure that corrodes the heart. Nikolay, the
mother, and Sofya were unwilling to let the sorrowful mood produced by
the death of their comrade give way to the joy brought in by Sasha.
Unconsciously defending their melancholy right to feed on their
sadness, they tried to impose their feelings on the girl.

"And now he's dead," announced Sofya, watching her carefully.

Sasha glanced around quickly, with a questioning look. She knit her
eyebrows and lowered her head. She was silent for a short time,
smoothing her hair with slow strokes of her hand.

"He's dead?" She again cast a searching glance into their faces. "It's
hard for me to reconcile myself to the idea."

"But it's a fact," said Nikolay with a smile.

Sasha arose, walked up and down the room, and suddenly stopping, said
in a strange voice:

"What does 'to die' signify? What died? Did my respect for Yegor die?
My love for him, a comrade? The memory of his mind's labor? Did that
labor die? Did all our impressions of him as of a hero disappear
without leaving a trace? Did all this die? This best in him will
never die out of me, I know. It seems to me we're in too great a hurry
to say of a man 'he's dead.' That's the reason we too soon forget that
a man never dies if we don't wish our impressions of his manhood, his
self-denying toil for the triumph of truth and happiness to disappear.
We forget that everything should always be alive in living hearts.
Don't be in a hurry to bury the eternally alive, the ever luminous,
along with a man's body. The church is destroyed, but God is immortal."

Carried away by her emotions she sat down, leaning her elbows on the
table, and continued more thoughtfully in a lower voice, looking
smilingly through mist-covered eyes at the faces of the comrades:

"Maybe I'm talking nonsense. But life intoxicates me by its wonderful
complexity, by the variety of its phenomena, which at times seem like a
miracle to me. Perhaps we