ng his hands,
he cracked his fingers.

"One must know all the facts," he said in his thin voice. "A
man's strength has its limits, countess, and I have reached my
limits. The whole day I have had to be making arrangements,
arrangements about household matters arising" (he emphasized the
word _arising_) "from my new, solitary position. The servants,
the governess, the accounts.... These pinpricks have stabbed me to
the heart, and I have not the strength to bear it. At dinner...
yesterday, I was almost getting up from the dinner table. I
could not bear the way my son looked at me. He did not ask me
the meaning of it all, but he wanted to ask, and I could not bear
the look in his eyes. He was afraid to look at me, but that is
not all...." Alexey Alexandrovitch would have referred to the
bill that had been brought him, but his voice shook, and he
stopped. That bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he
could not recall without a rush of self-pity.

"I understand, dear friend," said Lidia Ivanovna. "I understand
it all. Succor and comfort you will find not in me, though I
have come only to aid you if I can. If I could take from off you
all these petty, humiliating cares...I understand that a woman's
word, a woman's superintendence is needed. You will intrust it
to me?"

Silently and gratefully Alexey Alexandrovitch pressed her hand.

"Together we will take care of Seryozha. Practical affairs are
not my strong point. But I will set to work. I will be your
housekeeper. Don't thank me. I do it not from myself..."

"I cannot help thanking you."

"But, dear friend, do not give way to the feeling of which you
spoke--being ashamed of what is the Christian's highest glory:
_he who humbles himself shall be exalted_. And you cannot thank
me. You must thank Him, and pray to Him for succor. In Him
alone we find peace, consolation, salvation, and love," she said,
and turning her eyes heavenwards, she began praying, as Alexey
Alexandrovitch gathered from her silence.

Alexey Alexandrovitch listened to her now, and those expressions
which had seemed to him, if not distasteful, at least
exaggerated, now seemed to him natural and consolatory. Alexey
Alexandrovitch had disliked this new enthusiastic fervor. He was
a believer, who was interested in religion primarily in its
political aspect, and the new doctrine which ventured upon
several new interpretations, just because it paved the way to
discussion a