"Yes, indeed, idiots--but----"
"Well, what will you say?" asked Lensky, roughly.
"I will say that Mascha will still meet many idiots in life who will misunderstand her innocence, and that she may once meet a rascal who will misuse her innocence."
"Nonsense! nonsense!" murmurs Lensky. "You do not understand your sister. If she were frivolous, then she would need strict surveillance. But our Mascha is not frivolous; she is given to exaggeration, tender, romantic. And, between ourselves, life is so common, so boundlessly common and dirty, that it seldom affords a temptation to a truly exalted nature. No, no; I have no fear for my pretty defiant one. I do not believe in the necessity of strict guarding."
"I think that young girls should be watched," said Nikolai, earnestly. "Our Mascha has no more worldly knowledge than a six-year-old child. She does not suspect that there is a danger in the world which she must avoid."
"But that is beautiful, wonderfully beautiful!" the virtuoso thunders at his son. "Would you wish it otherwise? Not I. No; I would not have our little gipsy differ by a hair from what she is."
"Nor I, on the whole," says Nikolai; "but under the existing sad circumstances----"
"What sad circumstances?" Lensky interrupts him. "Well, yes, that she has lost her mother is sad; I can never replace her to her. A mother cannot be replaced, least of all, one like hers; there is not another one like her in the world. But otherwise I think she does not fare badly. One pardons her wherever she goes; she is always treated like a little princess, always well cared for."
"Well cared for!" Nikolai bursts out. "Well cared for! I think she cannot be worse cared for than with the Jeliagins."
"Why?" asks Lensky, uneasily. "Barbara is not a bad woman. She is very good-natured."