want, but _it_ wants. By the way, he and I both love the same flowers.
I picked a rose this morning, one leaf fell, he picked it up.... I
gave him the whole rose.

'. . . D. often comes to us. Yesterday he spent the whole evening. He
wants to teach me Bulgarian. I feel happy with him, quite at home,
more than at home.

'. . . The days fly past. ... I am happy, and somehow discontent and I
am thankful to God, and tears are not far off. Oh these hot bright
days!

'. . . I am still light-hearted as before, and only at times, and only
a little, sad. I am happy. Am I happy?

'. . . It will be long before I forget the expedition yesterday. What
strange, new, terrible impressions when he suddenly took that great
giant and flung him like a ball into the water. I was not frightened
. . . yet he frightened me. And afterwards--what an angry face, almost
cruel! How he said, "He will swim out!" It gave me a shock. So I
did not understand him. And afterwards when they all laughed, when I
was laughing, how I felt for him! He was ashamed, I felt that he was
ashamed before me. He told me so afterwards in the carriage in the
dark, when I tried to get a good view of him and was afraid of him.
Yes, he is not to be trifled with, and he is a splendid champion. But
why that wicked look, those trembling lips, that angry fire in his
eyes? Or is it, perhaps, inevitable? Isn't it possible to be a man, a
hero, and to remain soft and gentle? "Life is a coarse business," he
said to me once lately. I repeated that saying to Andrei Petrovitch;
he did not agree with D. Which of them is right? But the beginning of