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RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD 37
toward arranging out of our children’s room a sort
of English nursery, in which she could rear
exemplary-English misses. But God knows how hard it was to
establish a nursery of English misses in the house of
a Russian landed proprietor, where the ages and
generations had all been imbued with the habits of manor
lords, inaccuracy, and lack of orderliness.
Nevertheless, thanks to her remarkable persistence, she
attained her object to a certain extent.
It is true that she never succeeded in getting the
better of my sister, who had been accustomed up to
that time to perfect freedom. At last, when Aniuta
had passed her fifteenth birthday, she made her final
escape from authority. The formal act by which her
freedom from the tutelage of the governess was
expressed was the removal of her bed from the
nursery to a room next to mama’s bedroom. From
that day forth Aniuta began to consider herself a
grown-up young lady, and the governess made haste
to announce, on every convenient occasion, in a
touchy sort of way, that she had nothing to do with
Aniuta’s conduct—that she washed her hands of her.
But, on the other hand, she concentrated all her
efforts with great vigor upon me, isolating me from
all the members of the household and hedging me
about, as though guarding me from an epidemic,
against the influence of my older sister. This
yearning for separation on her part was favored by the
dimensions and construction of our country house, in
which two or three families could have lived
simultaneously and remained entire strangers to each
other.
Almost the whole of the lower story, with the
exception of several rooms for servants and for
casual guests, was given over to the governess and to
3*
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