Youth by Leo Tolstoy Chapter 25 Page 8

(the reading and the sewing of garments), and in the unusual whiteness of their hands. Those hands, en passant, showed a family feature common to all — namely, the feature that the flesh of the palm on the outer side was rosy in colour, and divided by a sharp, straight line from the pure whiteness of the upper portion of the hand.

Still more was the character of this feminine circle expressed in the manner in which the three ladies spoke Russian and French — spoke them, that is to say, with perfect articulation of syllables and pedantic accuracy of substantives and prepositions. All this, and more especially the fact that the ladies treated me as simply and as seriously as a real grown-up — telling me their opinions, and listening to my own (a thing to which I was so little accustomed that,