In a hurry to live, to enjoy herself, to play the lady, to be everywhere, to be seen, and last but not least, to be adored. To be adored and envied by women meant clothes and more clothes. And that meant to have to stand still and suffer, to be touched all over by the dirty hands of the dress-makers. The Princess despised the dress-makers as she did all other working people and treated them haughtily and unjustly. She disliked the smell of them, but she had to bear it in order to look lovely and rich. Rich! That was the word which sang always in the ears of the newly wed Princess. Rich, mighty, a figure at the court, a mistress of many souls. Of course there was a price to be paid for it, a price with disgusting features. This price was that she had to be the wife of Alexey Sokolow. She hated it, but what could she do? It was a bargain she could not confide to her most intimate friends. She was always conscious of why she had to endure it, but had not yet thought how she might get around it. For Nelidowa had been terribly poor. So poor that in the convent, where she had been brought up, she had not been given enough to eat. The nuns had used her as a kitchen maid and on the great holidays, when all the other aristocratic girls donated candles to the Saints as big as logs, she could not even buy a little waxen stick. Her father had been a great general, a superb aristocrat, her mother a Tartar Princess. But when her father, in one of his usual drinking spells, had fallen into the Volga and drowned, his family was left without a kopeck. Ill-meaning relatives scattered his brood, as they called it, into institutions and charity houses. Grown to be twenty, and without any desire to become a nun, an old and half blind aunt in a little city had taken Nelidowa in. There she was chained to a cranky invalid who gave her the switch once in a while, which was then the mode even for educated girls, as long as they were not married. Therefore, it was like a miracle when the match with the mighty Alexey Sokolow was suddenly in the air.