"Everybody loves those who are near," he continued. "To a
large heart, what is far is also near. You, mother, are capable
of a great deal. You have a large capacity of motherliness!"
"God grant it!" she said quietly. "I feel that it is good to live
like that! Here are you, for instance, whom I love. Maybe I love
you better than I do Pasha. He is always so silent. Here he wants
to get married to Sashenka, for example, and he never told me, his
mother, a thing about it."
"That's not true," the Little Russian retorted abruptly. "I know it
isn't true. It's true he loves her, and she loves him. But marry?
No, they are not going to marry! She'd want to, but Pavel--he can't!
He doesn't want to!"
"See how you are!" said the mother quietly, and she fixed her eyes
sadly and musingly on the Little Russian's face. "You see how you
are! You offer up your own selves!"
"Pavel is a rare man!" the Little Russian uttered in a low voice.
"He is a man of iron!"
"Now he sits in prison," continued the mother reflectively. "It's
awful, it's terrible! It's not as it used to be before! Life
altogether is not as it used to be, and the terror is different from
the old terror.
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