Wagons with wounded came to us only at long intervals.
The result of these three days was a strange new intimacy between the four of us.

I have never in all my life seen anything more charming than the behaviour of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch to Trenchard.
There is something about Russian kindness that is both simpler and more tactful than any other kindness in the world.

Tact is too often another name for insincerity, but Russian kindheartedness is the most honest impulse in the Russian soul, the quality that comes first, before anger, before injustice, before prejudice, before slander, before disloyalty, and overrides them all.

They were, of course, conscious that Trenchard's case was worse than their own.

Marie Ivanovna's death had shocked them, but she had been outside their lives and already she was fading from them.