picture; his thoughts swept over him like the waves of the Volga; the
lovely landscape was ever before his eyes, mirrored in his consciousness.

Veroshka and Marfinka provided him with amusement.

Veroshka was a little girl of six, with dark, brilliant eyes and dark
complexion, who was beginning to be serious and to be ashamed of her
baby ways. She would hop, skip and jump, then stand still, look shyly
round and walk sedately along; then she would dart on again like a bird,
pick a handful of currants and stuff them into her mouth. If Boris
patted her hair, she smoothed it rapidly; if he gave her a kiss, she
wiped it away. She was self-willed too. When she was sent on an errand
she would shake her head, then run off to do it. She never asked Boris
to draw for her, but if Marfinka asked him she watched silently and more
intently than her sister. She did not, like Marfinka, beg either
drawings or pencils.

Marfinka, a rosy little girl of four, was often self-willed, and often
cried, but before the tears were dry she was laughing and shouting again.
Veroshka rarely wept, and then quietly. She soon recovered, but she did
not like to be told to beg pardon.

Boris's aunt wondered, as she saw him gay and serious by turns, what
occupied his mind; she wondered what he did all day long. In answer
Boris showed his sketching folio; then he would play her quadrilles,
mazurkas, excerpts from opera, and finally his own improvisations.

Tatiana Markovna's astonishment remained. "Just like your mother," she
said. "She was just as restless, always sighing as if she expected
something to happen. Then she would begin to play and was gay again. See,