Not perceiving clearly the exact bearing of these last remarks, I ventured to suggest that priests ought to economise in view of future contingencies.

“It is easy to speak,” replied Batushka:  “‘A story is soon told,’ as the old proverb has it, ‘but a thing is not soon done.’  How are we to economise?  Even without saving we have the greatest difficulty to make the two ends meet.”

“Then the widow and daughters might work and gain a livelihood.”

“What, pray, could they work at?” asked Batushka, and paused for a reply.  Seeing that I had none to offer him, he continued, “Even the house and land belong not to them, but to the new priest.”

“If that position occurred in a novel,” I said, “I could foretell what would happen.  The author would make the new priest fall in love with and marry one of the daughters, and then the whole family, including the mother-in-law, would live happily ever afterwards.”

“That is exactly how the Bishop arranges the matter.  What the novelist does with the puppets of his imagination, the Bishop does with real beings of flesh and blood.  As a rational being he cannot leave things to chance.  Besides this, he must arrange the matter before the young man takes orders, because, by the rules of the Church, the marriage cannot take place after the ceremony of ordination.  When the affair is arranged before the charge becomes vacant, the old priest can die with the pleasant consciousness that his family is provided for.”

“Well, Batushka, you certainly put the matter in a very plausible way, but there seem to be two flaws in the analogy.  The novelist can make two people fall in love with each other, and make them live happily together with the mother-in-law, but that—­with all due respect to his Reverence, be it said—­is beyond the power of a Bishop.”

“I am not sure,” said Batushka, avoiding the point of the objection, “that love-marriages are always the happiest ones; and as to the mother-in-law, there are—­or at least there were until the emancipation of the serfs—­a mother-in-law and several daughters-in-law in almost every peasant household.”

“And does harmony generally reign in peasant households?”

“That depends upon the head of the house.  If he is a man of the right sort, he can keep the women-folks in order.”  This remark was made in an energetic tone, with the evident intention of assuring me that the speaker was himself “a man of the right sort”; but I did not attribute much importance to it, for I have occasionally heard henpecked husbands talk in this grandiloquent way when their wives were out of hearing.  Altogether I was by no means convinced that the system of providing for the widows and orphans of the clergy by means of mariages de convenance was a good one, but I determined to suspend my judgment until I should obtain fuller information.