married him. She gave an impression of great strength; her figure tall
and her bosom full, her dark eyes large and clear. She had black hair, a
vast quantity of it, piled upon her head. Her face was finely moulded,
her lips strong, red, sharply marked. She looked like a woman who had
already made up her mind upon all things in life and could face them
all. Her expression was often stern and almost insolently scornful, but
also she could be tender, and her heart would shine from her eyes. She
moved slowly and gracefully, and quite without self-consciousness.

A strange contrast was her sister, Nina Michailovna, a girl still, it
seemed, in childhood, pretty, with brown hair, laughing eyes, and a
trembling mouth that seemed ever on the edge of laughter. Her body was
soft and plump; she had lovely hands, of which she was obviously very
proud. Vera dressed sternly, often in black, with a soft white collar,
almost like a nurse or nun. Nina was always in gay colours; she wore
clothes, as it seemed to me, in very bad taste, colours clashing,
strange bows and ribbons and lace that had nothing to do with the dress
to which they were attached. She was always eating sweets, laughed a
great deal, had a shrill piercing voice, and was never still. Ivan
Petrovitch, the uncle, was very different from my Semyonov. He was
short, fat, and dressed with great neatness and taste. He had a short
black moustache, a head nearly bald, and a round chubby face with small
smiling eyes. He was a Chinovnik, and held his position in some
Government office with great pride and solemnity. It was his chief aim,
I found, to be considered cosmopolitan, and when he discovered the
feeble quality of my French he insisted in speaking always to me in his
strange confused English, a language quite of his own, with sudden
startling phrases which he had "snatched" as he expressed it from
Shakespeare and the Bible. He was the kindest soul alive, and all he
asked was that he should be left alone and that no one should quarrel