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RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD
97
popovitch. "And it was fun to watch them! The
young mistress walked along in silence, with downcast
eyes, playing with the parasol which she held in her
hands. But he strode along beside her, with his long
legs, exactly like a long-legged stork; and he kept
jabbering something all the time and waving his hands
about. And all at once he pulls a towsled little book
from his pocket and begins to read aloud, just as if
he were reading her a lesson."
As a matter of fact, it must be confessed that the
young priest’s son bore very little resemblance to the
fairy prince or the knight of the middle ages of whom
Aniuta had been dreaming. His lank, awkward
figure; his long, sinewy neck and pale face, framed in
thin, reddish-sandy hair; his large, red hands, with
flat and not always immaculately clean nails; and,
worst of all, his unpleasant, vulgar pronunciation,
smacking too much of the o,1 which was an
indubitable proof of his priestly extraction and his
education in the free ecclesiastical seminary — all this did
not make him a very fascinating hero in the eyes of a
young girl with aristocratic habits and tastes. It was
difficult to imagine that Aniuta’s interest in the priest’s
son rested on a romantic basis. Evidently there was
something else at the bottom of it.
And, in fact, the young man’s chief attraction in
Aniuta’s eyes consisted in his having just come from
1 The church service is conducted not in modern Russian but
in the ancient Slavonic language. The pronunciation of the
Slavonic differs in divers respects from that of modern
Russian, and the specially noticeable point is the full, round
utterance of the letter o on all occasions. In the ordinary, cultivated
language, the o gets its full sound only when it occurs in the
accented syllable of a word, otherwise it sounds like a. From
force of habit priests usually pronounce the o too distinctly in
their ordinary language.—Trans.
7
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