Such a forest was that skirting the estate of the Duchesse de Salvières, _née_ Palitzin, and in the dark before a bitter November dawn--bitter even for that glacial region--this charming person herself, masked to the eyes in fur, was driving her tröika furiously in the direction of Tverna. To drive a tröika, whether on earth or on snow, is an accomplishment seldom acquired by women, but Tatiana-Vassilièvna de Salvières--who never lost an occasion of declaring that she was _not_ a woman--knew the art as thoroughly as the foremost _yèmshik_ in Muscovy.
Her above-mentioned pretensions were, fortunately, not borne out by any stigma of masculinity, either physical or mental--unless one could class in the latter category a fixity of purpose, a calm courage, and an inexhaustible fund of dogged endurance; which qualities, either singly or in combination, are wholly foreign to the feminine nature. Extremely lovely still, with her graceful oval face lighted by deep dark-gray eyes, and framed in warm-chestnut hair threaded already with narrow ribbons of clear silver, her short, authoritative nose, her firm, well-arched mouth and obstinate little chin, deft by a characteristic _fossette_, she was what the French graphically call _faite au tour_ (made on a turner’s lathe). She was not tall, but admirably proportioned: slim-waisted, full-hipped, and square-shouldered, and her hands, extraordinarily small, but yet in no way resembling the useless, tapering, monkey-like variety so dear to flashy novelists under the appellation of _mains de Duchesse_, were shaped on an especially artistic model, which showed both character and strength. Her feet followed suit, amusingly high-arched, eminently aristocratic, and yet capable of being stood upon with supple energy, under any and every circumstance, and from her whole being there emanated a vigor, a self-reliance, and a _savoir-faire_ altogether uncommon in these slouchy, spineless, neurasthenic days.
Such was the sister-in-law given by a far-seeing Providence to Laurence Seton, Princess Basil Palitzin, and lucky it was for her that this was so, for, to put it mildly, that fair daughter of Albion was just then seriously dismayed by a certain hornet’s nest that she had wilfully broken open.