t at a picture exhibition. Why?

Yulia Sergeyevna looked at the pictures as her husband did, through
her open fist or an opera-glass, and was surprised that the people
in the pictures were like live people, and the trees like real
trees. But she did not understand art, and it seemed to her that
many pictures in the exhibition were alike, and she imagined that
the whole object in painting was that the figures and objects should
stand out as though they were real, when you looked at the picture
through your open fist.

"That forest is Shiskin's," her husband explained to her. "He always
paints the same thing. . . . But notice snow's never such a lilac
colour as that. . . . And that boy's left arm is shorter than his
right."

When they were all tired and Laptev had gone to look for Kostya,
that they might go home, Yulia stopped indifferently before a small
landscape. In the foreground was a stream, over it a little wooden
bridge; on the further side a path that disappeared in the dark
grass; a field on the right; a copse; near it a camp fire--no
doubt of watchers by night; and in the distance there was a glow
of the evening sunset.

Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then
along the little path further and further, while all round was
stillness, the drowsy landrails calling and the fire flickering in
the distance. And for some reason she suddenly began to feel that
she had seen those very clouds that stretched across the red part
of the sky, and that copse, and that field before, many times before.
She felt lonely, and longed to walk on and on along the path; and
there, in the glow of sunset was the calm reflection of something
unearthly, eternal.

"How finely that's painted!" she said, surprised that the picture
had suddenly become intelligible to her.

"Look, Alyosha! Do you see how peaceful it is?"

She began trying to explain why she liked the landscape so much,
but neither Kostya nor her husband understood her. She kept looking
at the picture with a mournful smile, and the fact that the others
saw nothing special in it troubled her. Then she began walking
through the rooms and looking at the pictures again. She tried to
understand them and no longer thought that a great many of them
were alike. When, on returning home, for the first time she looked
attentively at the big picture that hung over the piano in the
drawing-room, she felt a dislike for it, and said:

"What an idea to have