'How can it ever be all right?'
"I so much hoped that he would settle down here; it would just
have suited him. And it was his own idea, too; he had even taken
a cottage in the village," Aunt Masha sadly recalled.
"When he left me to go back to the hotel where he was staying,
it seemed to me that he was rather calmer.
"When he said good-by, he even made some joke about his having
come to the wrong door.
"I certainly would never have imagined that he would go away
again that same night."
It was a grievous trial for Aunt Masha when the old confessor
Iosif, who was her spiritual director, forbade her to pray for her
dead brother because he had been excommunicated. She was too
broad-minded to be able to reconcile herself to the harsh
intolerance of the church, and for a time she was honestly
indignant. Another priest to whom she applied also refused her
request.
Marya Nikolayevna could not bring herself to
disobey her spiritual fathers, but at the same time she felt that
she was not really obeying their injunction, for she prayed for him
all the same, in thought, if not in words.
There is no knowing how her internal discord would have ended
if her father confessor, evidently understanding the moral torment
she was suffering, had not given her permission to pray for her
brother, but only in her cell and in solitude, so as not to lead
others astray.
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