Thomas Hardy is said to have had many attachments in his youth. But apparently the memory of one, an unspoken yearning, remained with him all his life. It was a farmer's daughter, called Louisa. One day, while going home, he saw her walking leisurely down the lane, apparently wanting to speak to him. He too longed to speak to her but was too shy to do so and just managed to say "Good Evening" and go on. Regretting that shyness afterwards, he traced her to her school and went to see her there, being rewarded with shy smiles. Later still, much later, he visited her grave. At the end of his life, it was she that he recalled a few months before his death with his poem Louisa in the Lane. Was it she he was thinking of in a poignant scene early in his Tess of the D'Urbervilles? Three brothers were walking across Tess's village when the women of the place were dancing on the village green to mark a festival. The youngest boy among the travellers broke away to join the dancers. He asked the boldest girl there, the one near the entrance, to dance with him, while Tess, "modest, expressive, soft," in Hardy's words, stood shyly by the hedge. When leaving to join his brothers, the boy felt that she had been expecting him to ask her to dance and had been hurt by his oversight. Yes, he was Angel. This is no place to analyse Tess, gentle, sweet, trusting and ill-used. But one is left with the feeling that what Hardy was depicting here was more a dream than a real woman. Alexander Kuprin's Ivan Timofeyevich, a civil servant, posted to some backwoods, fell in love with a gypsy girl called Olesya, as she did with him. He even wanted to marry her but she turned him down and disappeared, leaving an ordinary bead-necklace in her hut as a memento for him. We can detect her image in almost every one of his stories, sometimes faint, often clear. Kuprin had lived a full life. He adopted about eight professions, including those of a botanist and a circus performer, roaming the length and breadth of European Russia. He left his country, as did Gorky and Alexei Tolstoi, following the October Revolution but, unlike them, did not return even later, being buried in Paris. Till the end, he was writing, thinking, dreaming of the Russian soil. Olesya, despised, rejected like other gypsies, was an integral part of that Russia. Why did he remember only her among the thousands he must have come across in his vast motherland? In his great short story, The Garnet Bracelet, Kuprin says of the main character, Vera: "At that moment she realised that love of which every woman dreams had gone past her." Maybe every man too, well not every, dreams of a great love. Louisa and Olesya were "les amours manques" of Hardy and Kuprin. Yun hi sa thha koi jis nay hamein mita dala, / Na koi noor ka putla na koi zohra jabeen.-(Firaq) The writer is a former ambassador