Page:Pushkin - Russian Romance (King, 1875).djvu/171

159 head. All this was something quite new in the province, and the girls were losing their senses.

But Lisa (or Betsy, as Grigory Ivánovitch generally called her), the daughter of my Anglomane, was more taken up with him than was anybody else. Their fathers did not visit, and she had not even seen Aleksèy when he had already become the subject of conversation of all her young neighbours. She was seventeen. Her black eyes lit up her dark and very agreeable face. She was an only, and consequently a spoilt, child. Her high spirits and her constant humour enraptured her father, and distracted her governess, Miss Jackson, a conceited spinster of forty, who painted her face and eyebrows, read "Pamela" twice a year, received the sum of two thousand roubles, and who felt bored to death in that barbarous Russia.

Lisa was waited upon by Nastia, who, though a little older, was quite as giddy as her mistress. Lisa was very fond of her, confiding to her all her secrets, and arranging with her all her little plans; in a word, Nastia was a much more important personage on the Anossoff estate than could be any one confidante in a French tragedy.

"May I go out to-day?" asked Nastia upon one occasion, whilst dressing her mistress.

"Certainly—where?"

"To Tugilevo, to the Beréstoffs. It is the Saint's-day of their cook's wife, and she came yesterday to invite us to dinner."

"Is that it?" said Lisa: "the masters are at enmity, and the servants entertain each other!"