"But she wept not; she only kept repeating: 'O my friend! O my brother!'
"'Then you will go with me everywhere,' he said to her, some fifteen minutes later, as before enclosing and supporting her in his embrace.
"'Everywhere, to the end of the earth; wherever you are, there shall I be.'
"'And you are sure you do not deceive yourself? You know your parents will never consent to our marriage?'
"'That I am not a Russian, that I am fated to live beyond Russia, that you will have to break all your ties with your country and your family?'
"'You know also that I have devoted my life to a difficult, thankless task; that I ... that we shall have to expose ourselves not only to dangers, but to deprivation, and to degradation perhaps?'
"'I know, I know it all ... but I love you.'
"'That you will have to give up all your habits; that there alone, among strangers, you will perhaps have to toil?'
"She put her hands on his lips. 'I love you, darling.'
"He began to kiss warmly her narrow, rosy hand. Helen did not take her hand from his lips, and with a kind of childish joy, with laughing curiosity, she watched him covering with kisses now her hand, now her fingers.
"Suddenly she blushed, and hid her face on his breast.
"He gently raised up her head and looked firmly into her eyes.
"'So God be with you,' he said; 'be thou my wife both before men and before God.'"
26. These, then, were the numerous great virtues of Turgenef; and they have made him the most enjoyable of artists. But his one great vice, the vice of doubt, the vice of hopelessness, has made him, as a nourisher of the spirit, among the least profitable as a writer.
27. For, O my friends, it cannot be stated too often that whatever puts new strength into the spirit is from the great God, the Good; and whatever takes strength from the spirit is from the great Devil, the Evil. And the things that have ever proved the inexhaustible sources of strength to the soul have been not doubt and despair, but faith and hope,--faith that the destinies of men are guided by love even though guided through the agony of sorrow; faith that behind this appearance of discord and blind fate and brute force there is after all to be found the substance of harmony, of wise forethought, of tender love; hope, that however terrible the present, the future will yet be one of joy, one of peace. If reason with its logic can strengthen this faith, this hope, then welcome reason, blessed be reason; but if reason with its logic can only make me doubt the presence of wisdom, the presence of love, then begone reason, cursed be reason. Verily, by their fruits ye shall know them!