No information is forthcoming as regards her general education. But from her voluminous correspondence with Tchaikovsky, his brother Modeste derives the impression that she was a proud and energetic woman, of strong convictions, with the mental balance and business capacity of a man, and well able to struggle with adversity; a woman, moreover, who despised all that was petty, commonplace, and conventional, but irreproachable in all her aspirations and in her sense of duty; absolutely free from sentimentality in her relations with others, yet capable of deep feeling, and of being completely carried away by what was lofty and beautiful. In 1848 Nadejda Filaretovna married K. von Meck, an engineer employed upon the Moscow-Warsaw line, and with her marriage began a hard time in her life. As a devoted wife and mother, Frau von Meck had a great deal to endure, from which, however, she emerged triumphant in the end. “I have not always been rich,” she says in one of her letters to Tchaikovsky; “the greater part of my life I was poor, very poor indeed. My husband was an engineer in the Government service, with a salary of 1500 roubles a year (£150), which was all we had to live upon, with five children and my husband’s family on our hands. Not a brilliant prospect, as you see! I was nurse, governess, and sewing-maid to my children, and valet to my husband; the housekeeping was entirely in my hands; naturally there was plenty of work, but I did not mind that. It was another matter which made life unbearable. Do you know, Peter Ilich, what it is to be in the Government service? Do you know how, in that case, a man must forget he is a reasoning being, possessed of will-power and honourable instincts, and must become a puppet, an automaton? It was my husband’s position which I found so intolerable that finally I implored him to send in his resignation. To his remark that if he did so we should starve, I replied that we could work, and that we should not die of hunger. When at last he yielded to my desire, we were reduced to living upon twenty kopecks a day (5_d._) for everything. It was hard, but I never regretted for a moment what had been done.” Thanks to this energetic step, taken at the entreaty of his wife, Von Meck became engaged in private railway enterprises, and gradually amassed a fortune and put by some millions of roubles. In 1876 Nadejda was left a widow. Of eleven children, only seven lived with her. The others were grown up, and had gone out into the world. She managed her complicated affairs herself, with the assistance of her brother and her eldest son. But her chief occupation was the education of her younger children. After her husband’s death, Nadejda von Meck gave up going into society; she paid no more visits, and remained, in the literal sense of the word, “invisible” to all but the members of her domestic circle.[48]