The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

sharply transitioned her into adulthood. She knew my grief about the curls, and on my birthday, March 25th, she combed her hair like a child again. A wonderful day was the day of my birthday! She gave me an iron ring on a silver lining; on it was carved her name, some sort of motto, some sort of sign, a snake's head, etc.; in the evening we read from memory an excerpt from "Fingal"—she was Moina, I was Fingal (I probably had memorized verses for my birthday as a surprise to myself), since then I have not once opened Ozerov. Studies went lazily again: lively sympathy pleased me more than a book. With no one and never before her did I speak about feelings, and meanwhile there were already many of them, thanks to the rapid development of the soul and the reading of novels; it was to her that I imparted my first dreams, dreams colorful as birds of paradise and pure as a child's babble; I wrote to her about twenty times in an album in Russian, in French, in German, even, I remember, in Latin. She listened to me with great seriousness and assured me even more that I was born to be Roland Rolandi or Alcibiades; I loved her even more for these affirmations. I was warming myself then for all the coldness of my short life with the dear friendship of the Melenki peri. Having exchanged the fruits of our sentiments, we began to read together—first various novels, "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Numa Pompilius," Florian, etc., bathing them in rivers of hot tears; then we undertook "Anacharsis's Travels," and she had the self-sacrifice to listen to this—let us assume extremely learned, useful, and smart, but nevertheless boring and lifeless compilation in seven volumes.

I do not know if her influence on me was good in all respects. With many true and beautiful virtues, the Melenki cousin was not free from the strained "sentimentality" which is instilled in girls in the dormitories of women's boarding schools, where they pierce monograms on their hands with pins, where they take vows not to remove such-and-such a ribbon for a year; she was also not free from moral sententiousness, that darnel which filled the novels and comedies of the last century. She liked to be called Temira, and all her relatives called her that; this alone proves the sentimentality; really, a simple person does not