Family Happiness, by Leo Tolstoy (1859)

I was told during this time I grew thin and lost my looks, but this did not even interest me. Why? For whom? It seemed to me that the whole of my life was bound to pass in this same lonely backwater and hopeless melancholy, from which I myself, alone as I was, had neither the strength nor even the will to escape.

'It's a bad thing not to be able to endure solitude,' he said. 'Are you really a young lady?'

'Of course I am,' I replied, laughing.

'Well, it's not much of a young lady who's only alive as long as she's being admired, and as soon as she's left alone simply goes to pieces and loses interest in life; she's all just for show, and doesn't have anything in herself to fall back on.'

Only now did I notice in his face, which at first sight seemed merely cheerful, this gaze that belonged to him alone - at first clear, and then more and more attentive and rather sad.

Meanwhile, spring had arrived. My earlier melancholy had passed and was replaced by a dreamy springtime melancholy of incoherent hopes and desires. Although I did not live as I had done at the start of winter, I occupied myself with Sonya and music and reading, I often went into the garden and wandered along its avenues, or sat on a bench, for a long, long time, thinking, wishing and hoping for Heaven knew what.

It is hard for me now to remember and understand those dreams that filled my imagination then. Even when I do remember them, I cannot believe that they really were mine. So strange they were, and so remote from life.

From everywhere there was a stronger scent of flowers, abundant dew suffused the grass, a nightingale began to trill in a lilac bush close by and fell silent, having heard our voices; the starry sky seemed to lower itself over us.

'Would it not be a disaster for you to unite your life with an old man, a man whose time is past, who only wants to sit still, while in you goodness only knows what's fermenting, what desires are hatching?'

I felt that it was better and more worthy for me to display before him the better aspects of my soul, rather than those of my body.

He would ask me a question, looking into my eyes, and his gaze would draw from me the thought he wished to hear. All the thoughts, all the feelings I had then were not my own, but were his feelings and thoughts which suddenly became mine, moved across into my life and illuminated it.

Even Katya, whom I knew and loved like my own self, even she changed in my eyes, Only now did I understand that she was not at all obliged to be the mother, friend and slave that she was for us. I understood all the self-effacement and devotion of this loving creature, understood all the ways in which I was obliged to her; and began to love her even more. He also it was who taught me to look at our servants, serfs, menials and maids in a completely different way from before. It is ridiculous to say it, but until the age of seventeen I had lived among these people more estranged from them than from people I had never seen; never once did I reflect that these people had loves, desires and regrets, just as I had. Our garden, our groves, our fields, which I had known so long, suddenly became new and beautiful for me. Not for nothing did he say that in life there is only one indubitable happiness - to live for another.