y of thought, not its fashion, that matters.
True, Ivan Gregoriev, musician by necessity, philosopher by instinct
only, left in the end little record of his answer to the riddle. But
this was rather well than ill. For, from the very beginning, Ivan's
"glimpse behind the veil" was distorted, clouded, smirched, by an
unconquerable cynicism: a personal resentment and rebellion against the
God who stood forth as the acknowledged creator of the miserably unhappy
race of men. The eternal question:--if God be only Omnipotent Good, why
the existence of evil?--he asked in ever-growing bitterness, till
so-called altruism became to him a mockery; and he took a painful
delight in twisting his wisdom into the most fantastic forms, which he
also made the sport and butt of formal logic; knowing always, in his
own heart, the evil that was wrought in him by those bitter reflections
that formed the refuge of his idle hours. Ah! Had Nathalie but cared!

September was gone ere Ivan wrote the dedications of his five
newly-finished works. And then, thinking of the men so remembered, he
realized that they all happened, for the moment, to be in Moscow.
Thereupon he suddenly decided to invite them to Maidonovo for
forty-eight hours, and, during that time, to hold a manuscript festival,
in which his and their unpublished works should be played each by its
composer, and criticised by the listeners.

An invitation from Ivan was not now a thing to be refused. Therefore the
evening of October 10th found six men assembled round the samovar in the
transformed living-room of Ivan's home. For the time, the host had
thrown off his habitual air of grave reserve, and, responding to the
friendly and congenial atmosphere around him, expanded to a gayety, a
magnetic boyishness, that fascinated as much as it amazed the four who
knew him as no others could; and sent Avelallement, a wealthy German
dilettante, whose acquaintance with the famous Russian consisted of a
long correspondence and a fanatical admiration of his work, back to his
native Hamburg determined on bringing Ivan to Germany, in order that the
most sentimental, hospitable and musical race in the world might come to
know, as he did, the great-hearted Russian, whose only possible fault
was that he had not been born on the other side of the frontier.

That evening, and the day that followed, were more delightful than Ivan
had dared hope. Surrounded by those who were big enough to understand
him, (a