The mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, who at one time had been handsome, but now, asthmatic, depressed, vague, and over-feeble for her years, tried to entertain me with conversation about painting. Having heard from her daughter that I might come to Shelkovka, she had hurriedly recalled two or three of my landscapes which she had seen in exhibitions in Moscow, and now asked what I meant to express by them.

Many of the seemingly bizarre courtship practices of English males—the cautiousness, reserve and apparent stand-offishness that foreign females complain about—are characteristic features of ‘negative politness’.

In these rapid games we had just twenty-five minutes each to make all our moves, a far cry from traditional chess, where games can last up to seven hours.

It had been used for clownish mock-disappearences, one auguste looking for another through endlessly circling blackness, an apparatus not now much in use.