painful, yet rapturous, hours when, by the trembling light of a
lamp, and almost at the very bedside of my poor sick mother, we
kept midnight tryst. Whatsoever first came into our heads we
spoke of--whatsoever came riven from our hearts, whatsoever
seemed to call for utterance, found voice. And almost always we
were happy. What a grievous, yet joyous, period it was--a period
grievous and joyous at the same time! To this day it both hurts
and delights me to recall it. Joyous or bitter though it was, its
memories are yet painful. At least they seem so to me, though a
certain sweetness assuaged the pain. So, whenever I am feeling
heartsick and oppressed and jaded and sad those memories return
to freshen and revive me, even as drops of evening dew return to
freshen and revive, after a sultry day, the poor faded flower
which has long been drooping in the noontide heat.

My mother grew better, but still I continued to spend the nights
on a chair by her bedside. Often, too, Pokrovski would give me
books. At first I read them merely so as to avoid going to sleep,
but afterwards I examined them with more attention, and
subsequently with actual avidity, for they opened up to me a new,
an unexpected, an unknown, an unfamiliar world. New thoughts,
added to new impressions, would come pouring into my heart in a
rich flood; and the more emotion, the more pain and labour, it
cost me to assimilate these new impressions, the dearer did they
become to me, and the more gratefully did they stir my soul to
its very depths. Crowding into my heart without giving it time
even to breathe, they would cause my whole being to become lost
in a wondrous chaos. Yet this spiritual ferment was not
sufficiently strong wholly to undo me. For that I was too
fanciful, and the fact saved me.