Sophia was an ambitious, strong-willed, strong-minded woman, who dared to emancipate herself from the tyranny of Russian custom.
The _terem_, of which we hear so much, was the part of the palace sacred to the Tsaritsa and the Princesses--upon whose faces no man ever looked.

If a physician were needed he might feel the pulse and the temperature through a piece of gauze--but see the face never.

It is said that two nobles who one day accidentally met Natalia coming from her chapel were deprived of rank in consequence.
But the _terem_, with "its twenty-seven locks," was not going to confine the sister of Peter.

She met the eyes of men in public; studied them well, too; and then selected the instruments for her designs of effacing Peter and his mother, and herself becoming sovereign indeed.

A rumor was circulated that the imbecile Ivan (who was alive) had been strangled by Natalia's family.