"Oh, they do mock at us," she insisted. "My young brother works in one of the important departments and he heard a foreign Communist boasting that he had slept all night with a lady of title for ten cents. Now isn't that a mean and despicable thing to say? If a real man could buy a lady of quality for ten cents, shouldn't he be ashamed to mention it?"
"I guess so, Barishna," I said. "I don't care anything about the difference between titled and untitled loving."
"But you do think it was an unspeakable thing for a civilized man to say, don't you?" She stressed the word civilized as if I were a savage in her sight and she was eager to hear the opinion of a savage upon a civilized person.
"But, Barishna," I said, "the men of your class used to do worse things than that to the women of the class of the man who said he possessed a titled lady for ten cents. They did it to weak and ignorant girls and often didn't even pay the price of ten cents."
"Oh no," said the barishna, "no gentleman does that."
"But they do, Barishna. Many of your gentlemen still exercise even the medieval droits de seigneur in a different way. That's what Tolstoy's Resurrection is all about."
"So you read our Tolstoy? You like our Russian literature? Oh, I am glad that you do. They have destroyed everything, but they cannot destroy our Russian literature."
I was very embarrassed. Most of the bourgeois people I had met had refrained from saying anything against the Communists, even though they did not praise them. Suddenly the barishna said, "I want to leave Russia; I have friends in England. Would you marry me so that I could leave the country with you—just a formal arrangement?" I hesitated and said that I didn't know that I could.
"But many of the foreigners have married Russian girls and got them through to Berlin," she said.