. No, sir, why should you work yourself? That's not the way to do
things! They'll find a position for you--of the most gentlemanly, delicate
sort; your clerks will work, but you'll be their chief, over all of them.
And promotions will come to you of themselves.

LEONID. Perhaps they will make me vice-governor, or elect me marshal of the
nobility.

POTAPYCH. It's not improbable.

LEONID. Well, and when I'm vice-governor, shall you be afraid of me?

POTAPYCH. Why should I be afraid? Let others cringe, but for us it's all
the same. You are our master: that's honor enough for us.

LEONID. [_Not hearing_] Tell me, Potapych, have we many pretty girls here?

POTAPYCH. Why, really, sir, if you think it over, why shouldn't there be
girls? There are some on the estate, and among the house servants; only it
must be said that in these matters the household is very strictly run. Our
mistress, owing to her strict life and her piety, looks after that very
carefully. Now just take this: she herself marries off the protegees and
housemaids whom she likes. If a man pleases her, she marries the girl off
to him, and even gives her a dowry, not a big one--needless to say. There
are always two or three protegees on the place. The mistress takes a little
girl from some one or other and brings her up; and when she is seventeen
or eighteen years old, then, without any talk, she marries her off to some
clerk or townsman, just as she takes a notion, and sometimes even to a
nobleman. Ah, yes, sir! Only what an existence for these protegees, sir!
Misery!

LEONID. But why?

POTAPYCH. They have a hard time. The lady says: "I have found you a
prospective husband, and now," she says, "the wedding will be on such and
such a day, and that's an end to it; and don't one of you dare to argue
about it!" It's a case of get along with you to the man you're told to.
Because, sir, I reason this way: who wants to see disobedience in a person
he's brought up? And sometimes it happens that the bride doesn't like the
groom, nor the groom the bride: then the lady falls into a great rage. She
even goes out of her head. She took a notion to marry one protegee to a
petty shopkeeper in town; but he, an unpolished individual, was going to
resist. "The bride doesn't please me," he said, "and, besides, I don't want
to get married yet." So the mistress complained at once to the town bailiff
and to the priest: well, they brought the blockhead round.

LEONID. You don'