death-bed, a bitter smile contracting his lips.

As to Maria Dmitrievna, she really troubled herself about Liza very
little more than her husband did, for all that she had taken credit to
herself, when speaking to Lavretsky, for having educated her children
herself. She used to dress her like a doll, and when visitors were
present, she would caress her and call her a good child and her
darling, and that was all. Every continuous care troubled that
indolent lady.

During her father's lifetime, Liza was left in the hands of a
governess, a Mademoiselle Moreau, from Paris; but after his death she
passed under the care of Marfa Timofeevna. That lady is already known
to the reader. As for Mademoiselle Moreau, she was a very small woman,
much wrinkled, and having the manners of a bird, and the character of
a bird also. In her youth she had led a very dissipated life; in her
old age she retained only two passions--the love of dainties and the
love of cards. When her appetite was satiated, and when she was not
playing cards or talking nonsense, her countenance rapidly assumed an
almost death-like expression. She would sit and gaze and breathe, but
it was plain that there was not a single idea stirring in her mind.
She could not even be called good; goodness is not an attribute of
birds. In consequence either of her frivolous youth or of the air of
Paris, which she had breathed from her childhood's days, there was
rooted in her a kind of universal scepticism, which usually found
expression in the words, "_Tout ca c'est des betises_." She spoke an
incorrect, but purely Parisian jargon, did not talk scandal, and had
no caprices--what more could one expect from a governess? Over Liza
she had but little influence. All the more powerful, then, was the
influence exercised over the child by her nurse, Agafia Vlasievna.

That woman's story was a remarkable one. She sprang from a family of
peasants, and was married at sixteen to a peasant; but she stood out
in sharp relief against the mass of her peasant sisters. As a child,
she had been spoilt by her father, who had been for twenty years the
head of his commune, and who had made a good deal of money. She was
singularly beautiful, and for grace and taste she was unsurpassed in
the whole district, and she was intelligent, eloquent, and courageous.
Her master, Dmitry Pestof, Madame Kalitine's father, a quiet and
reserved man, saw her one day on the threshing-floor, had a talk with
her, a