Agafya Vlasyevna, nurse of Lisa.



Chapter I


A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear
heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be
sinking into its depths of blue.

In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government
town of O---- (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an
open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy.

The name of the former was Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin. Her husband, a
shrewd determined man of obstinate bilious temperament, had been dead
for ten years. He had been a provincial public prosecutor, noted in his
own day as a successful man of business. He had received a fair
education and had been to the university; but having been born in narrow
circumstances he realized early in life the necessity of pushing his own
way in the world and making money. It had been a love-match on Marya
Dmitrievna's side. He was not bad-looking, was clever and could be very
agreeable when he chose. Marya Dmitrievna Pesto--that was her maiden
name--had lost her parents in childhood. She spent some years in a
boarding-school in Moscow, and after leaving school, lived on the family
estate of Pokrovskoe, about forty miles from O----, with her aunt and
her elder brother. This brother soon after obtained a post in
Petersburg, and made them a scanty allowance. He treated his aunt and
sister very shabbily till his sudden death cut short his career. Marya