adequate devastation among the courtier army awaiting their acknowledged
young-ladyhood.

Thus comes it that we take a final glance through two childish
prison-houses, in far-separate Russian cities, wherein a youth and a
maiden lie nightly dreaming the same dreams: one of them a spirit
already bonded to the service of mind under the whip of circumstance:
destined to storm rocky heights, from which hard-won eminences he shall
command great views of sweeping plains and far-off mountain ranges; the
other a pretty chrysalis on the eve of her change into a butterfly of
butterflies; who is, nevertheless, to attempt flights overhigh and
overfar for her frail wings; venturing to unfriendly lands whence she
must return with frayed and tired pinions and a bruised and bleeding
little soul. And their two destinies, so divergent, are yet fated, ever
and again, in the swift swinging round their orbits, to approach, touch,
and bound away again in opposite directions, strive though they may to
maintain for a while some parallel course.

Kinder, most surely, just to leave them there: well-guarded children,
walled securely away from the black, bleak world; oblivious of all
things save the white innocency of their dreams of first, most fragile,
high-romantic love.

CHAPTER VII

SPRING AND THE ROSE

The summer of 1860 found Ivan Gregoriev at the end of an experience so
long, so difficult, so seemingly unendurable, that, up to the last few
months of its continuance, he had never indulged in any anticipations of
its conclusion. Like all things, however, his four years' battle came
finally to an end. One, two, three, four: despair, unhappiness,
resignation, and, lastly, some sort of authority as the recognized
leader in his work, at least, of the grandiloquent first form: so passed
the years of his cadetship, till, in the June of 1860, he graduated,
honorably, and went off to spend the summer at Klin in his own fashion,
giving very little thought to that impending commission which was once
again to reorder his existence. Many were the pleasures possible to him
now in that quiet spot. Some part of gilded Moscow--the very best of the
clubs, would have opened to him had he displayed any passion for
baccarat, or the kindred games indulged by the vast majority of his
class. Cared he naught for these, there was yet another, phase of
mannish existence to which he might agreeably be introduced. But when
aspiring sycophants, members of