Page:Rebels and reformers (1919).djvu/333

 stamped his foot passionately, crying "Don't say that Yasnaya Polyana is mine! everything is everyone else's." The child died when he was seven, and it was a most bitter grief to Tolstoy. But Masha, his second daughter, was a comfort to him; she took her father's side when she was only fifteen, and though she was very delicate, she used all the strength she had in working for the poor, looking after the peasants' wives and doing their work for them when they were ill, minding the children and cleaning and cooking.

Many people blame Countess Tolstoy for not seeing eye to eye with her husband, but I think it would have been a very great deal to expect of any woman, that she should discard all the habits of a lifetime and renounce everything she had been accustomed to, to change her way of living and of bringing up her children. She describes her feelings very well in a letter to her sister, saying that her husband is a leader, one who goes ahead of the crowd pointing the way men should go. "But I am the crowd," she says; "I live in its current, and see the light of the lamp which every leader, and Leo of course, carries, and I acknowledge it to be the light. But I cannot go faster; I am held by the crowd and by my surroundings and habits."

Countess Tolstoy also felt that her husband was wasting himself; he had a genius for writing novels, and he deliberately gave up writing them and occu