carefully. Now just take this: she herself marries off the protégées 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 protégées 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 protégées, sir!
Misery!

LEONÍD. But why?

POTÁPYCH. 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 protégée 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.

LEONÍD. You don't say.

POTÁPYCH. Yes, sir. And even if the mistress sees a girl at one of her
acquaintances', she immediately looks up a husband for her. Our mistress
reasons this way: that they are stupid; that if she doesn't look after them