She was very calm and youthfully superior.
"You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict of interests, as
social contests are with you in Europe. But it is not that at all. It is
something quite different."
"It is quite possible that I don't understand," I admitted.
That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the
understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very
Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all
the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world.
I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a
terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and
hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret
of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they
detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas
we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its
sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed....
I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they asked me to call in
the afternoon. At least Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner indulgently from the rear
platform of the moving car. The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
softened in her grey eyes.
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