"My mother's elder sister, Sybil, who a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared" (Nabokov 10).
I find it fascinating that the second sentence of this passage is treated in such an offhand manner by Humbert; he goes on to describe Sybil more rather than dwell on this disgusting thing his father has done. My memory of our protagonist's marriage to Charlotte Haze is a little fuzzy for me, but if the marriage in The Enchanter is anything to go by, this feels like foreshadowing. Humbert has inherited this disrespect for female emotion from his father, both in terms of how he treated his wife and his attraction to such young girls.
This might be reading too much into things, but I wonder if it's important that Sybil is his mother's "elder" sister, rather than a younger sister, or even just a sister without an adjective. She seems to be the first of many "elder" women that are treated poorly by men in this novel.
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