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.

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’.

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