“My friends!” said the uncle who was a colonel, and there was a note of exhaustion and bitterness in his voice.  “Who says that family honour is a mere convention?  I don’t say that at all.  I am only warning you against a false view; I am pointing out the possibility of an unpardonable mistake.  How can you fail to see it?  I am not speaking Chinese; I am speaking Russian!”

“My dear fellow, we do understand,” Ivan Markovitch protested mildly.

“How can you understand if you say that I don’t believe in family honour?  I repeat once more:  fa-mil-y ho-nour fal-sely un-der-stood is a prejudice!  Falsely understood!  That’s what I say:  whatever may be the motives for screening a scoundrel, whoever he may be, and helping him to escape punishment, it is contrary to law and unworthy of a gentleman.  It’s not saving the family honour; it’s civic cowardice!  Take the army, for instance. . . .  The honour of the army is more precious to us than any other honour, yet we don’t screen our guilty members, but condemn them.  And does the honour of the army suffer in consequence?  Quite the opposite!”

The other paternal uncle, an official in the Treasury, a taciturn, dull-witted, and rheumatic man, sat silent, or spoke only of the fact that the Uskovs’ name would get into the newspapers if the case went for trial.  His opinion was that the case ought to be hushed up from the first and not become public property; but, apart from publicity in the newspapers, he advanced no other argument in support of this opinion.

The maternal uncle, kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch, spoke smoothly, softly, and with a tremor in his voice.  He began with saying that youth has its rights and its peculiar temptations.  Which of us has not been young, and who has not been led astray?  To say nothing of ordinary mortals, even great men have not escaped errors and mistakes in their youth.  Take, for instance, the biography of great writers.  Did not every one of them gamble, drink, and draw down upon himself the anger of right-thinking people in his young days?  If Sasha’s error bordered upon crime, they must remember that Sasha had received practically no education; he had been expelled from the high school in the fifth class; he had lost his parents in early childhood, and so had been left at the tenderest age without guidance and good, benevolent influences.  He was nervous, excitable, had no firm ground under his feet, and, above all, he had been unlucky.  Even if he were guilty, anyway he deserved indulgence and the sympathy of all compassionate souls.  He ought, of course, to be punished, but he was punished as it was by his conscience and the agonies he was enduring now while awaiting the sentence of his relations.  The comparison with the army made by the Colonel was delightful, and did credit to his lofty intelligence; his appeal to their feeling of public duty spoke for the chivalry of his soul, but they must not forget that in each individual the citizen is closely linked with the Christian. . . .