face I have ever met in real life or in my dreams. Before me stood
a beauty, and I recognized that at the first glance as I should
have recognized lightning.
I am ready to swear that Masha—or, as her father called her,
Mashya—was a real beauty, but I don't know how to prove it. It
sometimes happens that clouds are huddled together in disorder
on the horizon, and the sun hiding behind them colors them and
the sky with tints of every possible shade—crimson, orange,
gold, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a monk, another like a
fish, a third like a Turk in a turban. The glow of sunset envelop-
ing a third of the sky gleams on the cross on the church, flashes
on the windows of the manor house, is reflected in the river and
the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far away against the back-
ground of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is flying homewards.
. . . And the boy herding the cows, and the surveyor driving in
his chaise over the dam, and the gentleman out for a walk, all
gaze at the sunset, and every one of them thinks it terribly beau-
tiful, but no one knows or can say in what its beauty lies.
I was not the only one to think the Armenian girl beautiful.
My grandfather, an old man of seventy, gruff and indifferent to
women and the beauties of nature, looked caressingly at Masha
for a full minute, and asked:
"Is that your daughter, Avert Nazaritch?"
"Yes, she is my daughter," answered the Armenian.
"A fine young lady," said my grandfather approvingly.
An artist would have called the Armenian girl's beauty clas-
sical and severe, it was just that beauty, the contemplation of
which—God knows why!—inspires in one the conviction that
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