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Anna Karenina was the name of the novel on which my Father and Mother were both at work. My Mother's work seemed much harder than my Father's, because we actually saw her at it, and she worked much longer hours than he did. … Leaning over the manuscript and trying to decipher my Father's scrawl with her short-sighted eyes, she used to spend whole evenings at work, and often sat up late at night after everybody else had gone to bed. Sometimes, when anything was written quite illegibly, she would go to my Father's study and ask him what it meant. … When it happened, my Father used to take the manuscript in his hand, and ask with some annoyance: "What on earth is the difficulty?" and would begin to read it out aloud. When he came to the difficult place he would mumble and hesitate, and sometimes had the greatest difficulty in making out, or rather in guessing, what he had written. (en) |