You are, all of you, too stupid to realise this, but you must take my word for it.

Show yourself off, my dear, and let them all see!" Marie Ivanovna most certainly did _not_ "show herself off." The beginning of his trouble was that he could not do with her as he pleased.

She had fallen into his hands so easily that he thought, I suppose, that "she had been dying of love for him" from the first moment of seeing him.

But this was I believe very far from the truth.
My impression of her acceptance of him was that she had done it "with her eyes fixed upon something else." That _she_ had not realised all the consequences of accepting _him_ any more than she had realised the consequences of her accepting Trenchard was obvious from the first.
She simply was ignorant of life, and at the same time wanted to cram into her hands the full sense of it (as one crushes rose-leaves) as quickly as possible.

She admired Semyonov--it may be that she loved him; but she certainly had not surrendered herself to him, and in her lively ignorant way she was as strong as he.
During the first weeks of her engagement she was, as she had been at her first arrival amongst us, as happy and light-hearted as a child.
She knew that we disapproved of her treatment of Trenchard, but she thought that we must see, as she did, that "she had behaved in the only possible way." Once again she was straight and honest to the world--and she could behave now like a real friend of her John.