Prince Vasili always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a
stale part. Anna Pavlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty
years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast
had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not
feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the
expectations of those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it
did not suit her faded features, always played round her lips
expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her
charming defect, which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it
necessary, to correct.
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
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