Excerpt from My Husband and I: And Other Stories We were in mourning for my mother, who had died early in the autumn, and Macha, Sonia, and I had passed the entire winter in the country. Macha had been an old friend of my mother, and was my governess, whom I had known and loved as long as I could remember. Sonia was my younger sister. The winter had been sad and dreary at Pokrovski, our old country house. It was cold, and the wind swept the snow in thick drifts as high as the window ledges; the window panes remained frosted for days together, and we seldom walked or drove out. Visitors came but rarely, and the few who did come brought neither mirth nor amusement with them. They had mournful faces, and spoke with bated breath, as if they feared to awaken a sleeper; they never smiled, but sighed and wept when they saw little Sonia and me in our black dresses. It was as if the Angel of Death was ever hovering in the air - as if the atmosphere was ever oppressed with his dread presence. My mother's room was kept shut, but I never passed the closed door without feeling an invisible something drawing me towards the cold and silent chamber. I had passed my seventeenth birthday, and it had been my mother's intention to go to St. Petersburg that winter, so that I might be formally introduced into society. My mother's loss had been a great grief to me, but I must confess that in the midst of my sorrow for her, I also felt a painful shrinking from the thought of spending another winter in the death-like solitude of the country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.