The Faraway Bride by Stella Benson — Read

Tatiana's mother, Varvara Alexeievna Ostapenko, sat in her garden, embroidering silk in bright colors. Varvara was a tall woman, thin and melancholy, with a dark birthmark on one cheek. She had a slow and anxious awkwardness of body; she held her head up often, as though listening, walked on tiptoe, and when, as now, she rested, never leaned back for more than a few seconds. A few seconds slackening and then again there she would be, listening, with her face up, as though expecting a call.

The garden, which had been made by their Japanese landlord, seemed built, fitted together, rather than grown. Curves of asymmetrical disciplined branches looped from sky to ground; the green in-bent horizon of the garden looked like handwriting against the dazzling sky. A young reddening maple, a pine, a Japanese cherry tree, and a stunted self-conscious cedar laid down careful shadows at one another's feet in a sort of cold courtliness. There were no flowers except Michaelmas daisies frothing in a mauve mist over the brim of a streaked glazed blue urn in a corner of the garden. Flying seedpods, gossamers and birds seemed like untidinesses in the air of a garden where even the shadows were studied. The September heat of the plain boxed in the garden as though in a glass case.