Lensky overthrows all his card-houses with an impatient gesture. "You prefer her to Harry?" he asks.
"Yes--I think--she is so loving, so tender, and looks so entirely like our family. I certainly love the boy also, but I cling to the little one, as to Colia and the remembrance of my dead mother."
Lensky drums in silence on the table for a while, then he begins: "Yes, yes, that is all very beautiful; but you are becoming one-sided, Mascha. The consequence is that your husband is too emancipated from you. You will rue that later."
Mascha does not answer a word. Ever more diligently her active fingers busy themselves with the white wool.
"You trouble yourself too little about him," says he, and looks at her sharply.
She crochets and is silent.
"Or"--with a burst of his old, untamable violence, Lensky strikes the table--"or he troubles himself too little about you."
There must have been some mistake in Mascha's work. She unravels a great piece of it. Her father draws the crochet work from her hand. "Leave that stupid stuff," cries he, angrily. "You cannot deceive me with your awkward, helpless comedy. I will see clearly into this affair. What position do you really occupy with your husband?"
Mascha passes her hand wearily over forehead and temples. Lensky is frightened at the unspeakable sadness which he reads on her pale face, now, when the brilliance of joy at seeing him again is gone from the large eyes.
"What position?" murmured she. "The position of a woman who must be thankful for her life long to her husband, for that he has saved her with the protection of his personality from a horrible shame."