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‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,’ I interrupted.

‘The beginning of faith,’ pursued Sophie, nothing daunted, ‘is self-abasement … humiliation.’

‘Humiliation even?’ I queried.

‘Yes. The pride of man, haughtiness, presumption–that is what must be utterly rooted up. You spoke of the will–that’s what must be broken.’

I scanned the whole figure of the young girl who was uttering such sentences…. ‘My word, the child’s in earnest, too,’ was my thought. I glanced at our neighbours in the mazurka; they, too, glanced at me, and I fancied that my astonishment amused them; one of them even smiled at me sympathetically, as though he would say: ‘Well, what do you think of our queer young lady? every one here knows what she’s like.’

‘Have you tried to break your will?’ I said, turning to Sophie again.

‘Every one is bound to do what he thinks right,’ she answered in a dogmatic tone. ‘Let me ask you,’ I began, after a brief silence, ‘do you believe in the possibility of calling up the dead?’

Sophie softly shook her head.

‘There are no dead.’

‘What?’

‘There are no dead souls; they are undying and can always appear, when they like…. They are always about us.’

‘What? Do you suppose, for instance, that an immortal soul may be at this moment hovering about that garrison major with the red nose?’

‘Why not? The sunlight falls on him and his nose, and is not the sunlight, all light, from God? And what does external appearance matter? To the pure all things are pure! Only to find a teacher, to find a leader!’

‘But excuse me, excuse me,’ I put in, not, I must own, without malicious intent. ‘You want a leader … but what is your priest for?’

Sophie looked coldly at me.

‘You mean to laugh at me, I suppose. My priestly father tells me what I ought to do; but what I want is a leader who would show me himself in action how to sacrifice one’s self!’

She raised her eyes towards the ceiling. With her childlike face, and that expression of immobile absorption, of secret, continual perplexity, she reminded me of the pre-raphaelite Madonnas….

‘I have read somewhere,’ she went on, not turning to me, and hardly moving her lips, ‘of a grand person who directed that he should be buried under a church porch so that all the people who came in should tread him under foot and trample on him…. That is what one ought to do in life.’

Boom! boom! tra-ra-ra! thundered the drums from the band…. I must own such a conversation at a ball struck me as eccentric in the extreme; the ideas involuntarily kindled within me were of a nature anything but religious. I took advantage of my partner’s being invited to one of the figures of the mazurka to avoid renewing our quasi-theological discussion.

A quarter of an hour later I conducted Mademoiselle Sophie to her father, and two days after I left the town of T—-, and the image of the girl with the childlike face and the soul impenetrable as stone slipped quickly out of my memory.

Two years passed, and it chanced that that image was recalled again to me. It was like this: I was talking to a colleague who had just returned from a tour in South Russia. He had spent some time in the town of T—-, and told me various items of news about the neighbourhood. ‘By the way!’ he exclaimed, ‘you knew V. G. B. very well, I fancy, didn’t you?’

‘Of course I know him.’

‘And his daughter Sophia, do you know her?’

‘I’ve seen her twice.’

‘Only fancy, she’s run away!’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Three months ago she disappeared, and nothing’s been heard of her. And the astonishing thing is no one can make out whom she’s run off with. Fancy, they’ve not the slightest idea, not the smallest suspicion! She’d refused all the offers made her, and she was most proper in her behaviour. Ah, these quiet, religious girls are the ones! It’s made an awful scandal all over the province! B.’s in despair…. And whatever need had she to run away? Her father carried out her wishes in everything. And what’s so unaccountable, all the Lovelaces of the province are there all right, not one’s missing.’