Princess Marya Alexeyevna Khovanskaya, my father’s sister, was a stern, forbidding old lady, stout and dignified, with a birthmark on her cheek and false curls under her bonnet; she used to screw up her eyes as she spoke, and to the end of her days, that is till she was eighty, used a little rouge and powder. Whenever she caught sight of me, she persecuted me; there was no end to her lecturing and grumbling; she would scold me for anything, for a crumpled collar, or a stain on my jacket, would declare I had not gone up to kiss her hand properly, and make me go through the ceremony again. When she had finished lecturing me, she would sometimes say to my father, taking with her fingertips a pinch of snuff out of a tiny gold snuffbox, ‘My dear, you should send your spoilt child to me to be corrected; he would be as soft as silk when he had been a month in my hands.

It always seemed to me that I had come into this life by mistake, and that soon I should go home again — but where was my home? … The longing to get out into another world grew stronger and stronger, and with it my disdain for my dark prison-house and its cruel sentinels.