The Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

...the relative from Melenki had a kind, dreamy soul; young women are generally incomparably more expansive than our own brotherhood; there is a warmth in them that is always glowing, a sympathy always ready to love; in them, feelings are rarely suppressed by egoism, and there is no masculine, calculating mind. During one of her visits, she favored me and lavished affection upon me; she felt sorry that I was so lonely, so without a greeting; she began to treat me, a thirteen-year-old boy, as if I were a grown man; for this, I loved her with all my heart; I gave her my small hand with fervor, swore a vow of friendship and love, and now, thirteen other years later, I am ready to extend my hand again—yet how many circumstances, people, and versts a Russian unit of distance, roughly 0.66 miles have crowded between us! She would fly in like a bright phantom from the banks of the Klyazma and disappear for a long time afterward; at that time, I wrote letters to Melenki every week, and in these epistles, all the dreams and beliefs of that time were preserved. She did not remain in my debt; she answered every letter and squandered with extraordinary generosity nouns and adjectives to describe the surroundings of Melenki, her room with its green window-curtains and purple gillyflowers a type of fragrant flower on the windows. But I was little satisfied with letters and waited with impatience for her own self; it was decided that she would come to us for a full six months; I counted the days on my fingers... And so, on one winter evening, I sit with Vasily Evdokimovich; he talks about four kinds of poetry and washes down each kind with kvass a traditional fermented beverage made from rye bread. Suddenly, there is noise, kisses, loud talk of joy, her voice... I opened the door; bundles and cardboard boxes are being dragged across the hall; my cheeks flushed with joy, I no longer listened to what Vasily Evdokimovich was saying about didactic poetry (perhaps that is why to this day I do not understand it, although since then I have had the occasion to read Petrozilius's poem "On Porcelain"); a few minutes later, she came to my little room, and after the insulting "Oh, how you have grown!" she asked what we were doing. I proudly answered: "Analyzing poetic works." I even remember the red merino dress in which she appeared before me then. But, alas! Times have changed: she braided her hair into a plait; this insulted me, me with my à l'enfant in the style of a child collars—the new hairstyle was so...