"So you are now twenty-four?"
"Last May. Are you frightened at such an age, fraulein?"
"That is not so old, twenty-four--particularly for a man," she
protested with great earnestness.
His father, he went on, was from Konigsberg, had studied philology,
and when he left the university had become a tutor in a
distinguished Russian family. He was the child of poor parents, and
had to take the first opportunity which presented itself of earning
his living. So he went to Russia, where he lived for twenty years as
a tutor in private families, and then as a teacher in a Moscow
gymnasium. He married late in life, an only child of German descent,
who helped her middle-aged husband by a calm observance of duty and
a mother's love for his children. "My mother was a remarkable woman.
She had dark eyes and hair, and an enthusiastic and devoted
expression in her face, which made me feel sad, as a child, if I
looked at her for long. She spoke little, and then in a curious
mixture of German and Russian. Strangely enough, she always called
herself a German, and spoke Russian like a foreigner; but later,
when we went to Berlin, she discovered that she was really a
Russia, and always wished she were back in Moscow,
never feeling at home amid her new surroundings.
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