Eye-brow

Don’t you think, Major Vampyre, that eye-brow ſtippled very prettily?

When that gentleman came from the city, and was welcomed in the drawing-room by his daughters and the elegant Miss Wirt, they saw at once by his face—which was puffy, solemn, and yellow at the best of times—and by the scowl and twitching of his black eye-brows, that the heart within his large white waistcoat was disturbed and uneasy.

Nadia’s grandmother is that extremely rare thing in Chekhov’s work, an almost entirely negative character. This is brought out in his opening description of her, which emphasises her physical repulsiveness: ‘Grandmother, or, as she was called at home “babulia”, was very fat, ugly, with thick eye-brows and a little moustache.[…]’