e ways and a tiny, birdlike mind. In her youth she
had led a very dissipated life, and in her riper years she had but two
passions left--for dainties and for cards. When she was gorged, was not
playing cards, and not chattering, her face instantly assumed an almost
deathlike expression: she would sit, and gaze, and breathe, and it was
evident that no thought was passing through her head. It was not even
possible to call her good-natured: there are also birds which are not
good-natured. Whether it was in consequence of her frivolously-spent
youth, or of the Paris air, which she had breathed since her
childhood,--she harboured within her a certain cheap, general scepticism,
which is usually expressed by the words: "_tout ca c'est des betises_."
She talked an irregular, but purely Parisian jargon, did not gossip, was
not capricious,--and what more could be desired in a governess? On Liza
she had little influence; all the more powerful upon her was the
influence of her nurse, Agafya Vlasievna.

The lot of this woman was remarkable. She sprang from a peasant family;
at the age of sixteen, they married her to a peasant; but there was a
sharp distinction between her and her sister-peasant women. For twenty
years her father had been the village elder, had accumulated a good deal
of money, and had petted her. She was a wonderful beauty, the most
dashingly-elegant peasant maid in all the country round about, clever, a
good talker, daring. Her master, Dmitry Pestoff, the father of Marya
Dmitrievna, a modest, quiet man, caught sight of her one day at the
threshing, talked with her, and fell passionately in love with her.

Soon afterward, she became a widow; Pestoff, although he was a married
man, took her into his house, and clothed her in the style of a
house-servant. Agafya immediately accommodated herself to her new
position, exactly as though she had never lived in any other way. Her
skin became white, she grew plump; her arms, under their muslin sleeves,
became "like fine wheat flour," like those of a cook; the samovar stood
constantly on her table; she would wear nothing but velvet and silk, she
slept on a feather-bed of down. This blissful life lasted for the space
of five years; but Dmitry Pestoff died: his widow, a good-natured
gentlewoman, desirous of sparing her husband's memory, was not willing to
behave dishonourably toward her rival, the more so, as Agafya had never
forgotten herself before her; but she married her to