Vera Michailovna on the other hand was a fine young woman and it must have been the first thought of all who met them as to why she had 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 with him.  He confided to me that he hated quarrels, and that it was an eternal sorrow to him that the Russian people should enjoy so greatly that pastime.  I discovered that he was terrified of his brother, Alexei, and at that I was not surprised.  His weakness was that he was inpenetrably stupid, and it was quite impossible to make him understand anything that was not immediately in line with his own experiences—­unusual obtuseness in a Russian.  He was vain about his clothes, especially about his shoes, which he had always made in London; he was sentimental and very easily hurt.