"My mother was a remarkable woman.

She had dark eyes and hair, and an enthusiastic and devoted expression in her face, which made me feel sad, as a child, if I looked at her for long.

She spoke little, and then in a curious mixture of German and Russian.

Strangely enough, she always called herself a German, and spoke Russian like a foreigner; but later, when we went to Berlin, she discovered that she was really a Russia, and always wished she were back in Moscow, never feeling at home amid her new surroundings.

She was a Protestant like her father, but had inherited from her Russian mother a lingering affection for the orthodox faith, and she often used to go to the Golden Church of the Kremlin, whose brown, holy images had a mystical effect on her.