. .  Agafya spoke to Lisa gravely and meekly, as though she felt herself to be unworthy to utter such high and holy words.  Lisa listened to her, and the image of the all-seeing, all-knowing God penetrated with a kind of sweet power into her very soul, filling it with pure and reverent awe; but Christ became for her something near, well-known, almost familiar.  Agafya taught her to pray also.  Sometimes she wakened Lisa early at daybreak, dressed her hurriedly, and took her in secret to matins.  Lisa followed her on tiptoe, almost holding her breath.  The cold and twilight of the early morning, the freshness and emptiness of the church, the very secrecy of these unexpected expeditions, the cautious return home and to her little bed, all these mingled impressions of the forbidden, strange, and holy agitated the little girl and penetrated to the very innermost depths of her nature.  Agafya never censured any one, and never scolded Lisa for being naughty.  When she was displeased at anything, she only kept silence.  And Lisa understood this silence; with a child’s quick-sightedness she knew very well, too, when Agafya was displeased with other people, Marya Dmitrievna, or Kalitin himself.  For a little over three years, Agafya waited on Lisa, then Mademoiselle Moreau replaced her; but the frivolous Frenchwoman, with her cold ways and exclamation, tout ca c’est des betises, could never dislodge her dear nurse from Lisa’s heart; the seeds that had been dropped into it had become too deeply rooted.  Besides, though Agafya no longer waited on Lisa, she was still in the house and often saw her charge, who believed in her as before.

Agafya did not, however, get on well with Marfa Timofyevna, when she came to live in the Kalitins’ house.  Such gravity and dignity on the part of one who had once worn the motley skirt of a peasant wench displeased the impatient and self-willed old lady.  Agafya asked leave to go on a pilgrimage and she never came back.  There were dark rumours that she had gone off to a retreat of sectaries.  But the impression she had left in Lisa’s soul was never obliterated.  She went as before to the mass as to a festival, she prayed with rapture, with a kind of restrained and shamefaced transport, at which Marya Dmitrievna secretly marvelled not a little, and even Marfa Timofyevna, though she did not restrain Lisa in any way, tried to temper her zeal, and would not let her make too many prostrations to the earth in her prayers; it was not a lady-like habit, she would say.  In her studies Lisa worked well, that is to say perseveringly; she was not gifted with specially brilliant abilities, or great intellect; she could not succeed in anything without labour.  She played the piano well, but only Lemm knew what it had cost her.  She had read little; she had not “words of her own,” but she had her own ideas, and she went her own way.  It was not only on the surface that she took after her father; he, too, had never asked other people