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.
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