MADAM ULANBEKOV.  Well, I should say!  Of course it must; because I brought you up; that’s equal to giving you life itself.

LEONID enters.

SCENE III

The same and LEONID

LEONID.  How are you, mamma?

MADAM ULANBEKOV.  How are you, my dear?  Where have you been?

LEONID.  I went hunting with Potapych.  I killed two ducks, mamma.

MADAM ULANBEKOV.  You don’t spare your mother; the idea, going hunting in your state of health!  You’ll fall sick again, God forbid! and then you’ll simply kill me!  Ah, my God, how I have suffered with that child! [She muses.

GAVRILOVNA.  Some tea, master?

LEONID.  No, thanks.

MADAM ULANBEKOV. [To VASILISA PEREGRINOVNA] When he was born, I was ill a very long time.  Then he was always sickly, and he grew up puny.  How many tears have I shed over him!  Sometimes I would just look at him, and my tears would flow; no, it will never be my lot to see him in the uniform of the guardsmen!  But it was most distressing of all for me when his father, owing to the boy’s poor health, was unable to send him to a military school.  How much it cost me to renounce the thought that he might become a soldier!  For half a year I was ill.  Just imagine to yourself, my dear, when he finishes his course, they will give him some rank or other, such as they give to any priest’s son clerking in a government office!  Isn’t it awful?  In the military service, especially in the cavalry, all ranks are aristocratic; one knows at once that even a junker is from the nobility.  But what is a provincial secretary, or a titular councillor!  Any one can be a titular councillor—­even a merchant, a church-school graduate, a low-class townsman, if you please.  You have only to study, then serve awhile.  Why, one of the petty townsmen who is apt at learning will get a rank higher than his!  That’s the way of the world!  That’s the way of the world!  Oh, dear! [She turns away with a wave of her hand] I don’t like to pass judgment on anything that is instituted by higher authority, and won’t permit others to do so, but, nevertheless, I don’t approve of this system.  I shall always say loudly that it’s unjust, unjust.

LEONID.  Why are Nadya’s eyes red from crying?

VASILISA PEREGRINOVNA.  She hasn’t been flogged for a long time.

MADAM ULANBEKOV.  That’s none of your business, my dear.  Nadya, go away, you’re not needed here.

[NADYA goes out.]

LEONID.  Well, I know why:  you want to marry her off.

MADAM ULANBEKOV.  Whether I do or not, my dear, is my own business. 
Furthermore, I do not like to have any one meddle in my arrangements.

VASILISA PEREGRINOVNA.  What a clever young man you are; you know everything, you get into everything!

LEONID.  Indeed, mamma dear, I don’t mean to meddle in your arrangements. 
Only he’s a drunkard.