her and visited her. She belonged to the highest society, and was
spoken of as a rather eccentric woman, not wholly good-natured, but
excessively clever. In her youth she had been very pretty. Poets
had written verses to her, young men had been in love with her,
distinguished men had paid her homage. But twenty-five or thirty years
had passed since those days and not a trace of her former charms
remained. Every one who saw her now for the first time was impelled to
ask himself, if this woman--skinny, sharp-nosed, and yellow-faced,
though still not old in years--could once have been a beauty, if she
was really the same woman who had been the inspiration of poets . . . .
And every one marvelled inwardly at the mutability of earthly things.
It is true that Pandalevsky discovered that Darya Mihailovna had
preserved her magnificent eyes in a marvellous way; but we have seen
that Pandalevsky also maintained that all Europe knew her.

Darya Mihailovna went every summer to her country place with her
children (she had three: a daughter of seventeen, Natalya, and two
sons of nine and ten years old). She kept open house in the country,
that is, she received men, especially unmarried ones; provincial
ladies she could not endure. But what of the treatment she received
from those ladies in return?

Darya Mihailovna, according to them, was a haughty, immoral, and
insufferable tyrant, and above all--she permitted herself such
liberties in conversation, it was shocking! Darya Mihailovna certainly
did not care to stand on ceremony in the country, and in the
unconstrained frankness of her manners there was perceptible a slight
shade of the contempt of the lioness of the capital for the petty and
obscure creatures who surrounded her. She had a careless, and even a
sarcastic manner with her own set; but the shade of contempt was not