"Of whom are you talking?" Madame Capriani asked in her depressed tone; she was sitting erect upon a small gilt chair, she wore a gray, silk-muslin gown, rather over-trimmed, _gants de Suede_, and an air of constraint. "Of whom are you talking?" she asked a second time, smoothing her gloves. "Of whom?--of that blockhead, Malzin," growled Capriani. "I told you from the first that he would never be able to fill that position," his wife rejoined. "Fill--!" Capriani shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, "fill--! it takes him two hours to write a business-letter. But I was prepared for that. His office is a sinecure; the salary that I pay him is an alms,--but Alfred Capriani can do as he pleases there,--and at least the fellow understands something about horses. What outrages me is to see how he squanders my money, the money that I give him. He ransacks the country round to buy back from the peasants relics of his parents. First an old clock, that struck twelve just as he was born, then an old piano, upon which his sisters used to strum the scales. 'Tis enough to drive one mad!" Frau von Capriani looked distressed. "That is a matter of sentiment," she suggested. "A matter of sentiment--a matter of sentiment," Capriani repeated sarcastically. "It would be a matter of sentiment and conscience to think of saving up something for his children." "You are right, you are right," the Countess rejoined, in her emphatic yet not unmelodious Russian-German, "but this time you are in some measure to blame for his folly. I begged you a hundred times to ask him what he would like to keep for himself of the furniture which was entirely useless to us. Instead, you had it all put up at auction." "And the proceeds of the sale are to be devoted to the building of a new school, to be entirely independent of ecclesiastical influence," said Capriani, "the old rubbish shall aid, willy-nilly, in the spread of modern liberal ideas. It is my aim to root out prejudices not to foster them. Would you have me minister directly to Malzin's folly? It would be nonsense. It makes me shudder to see this man, who owns nothing, positively nothing, except what I give him out of sheer kindness, and who ought to look ahead, keeping his eyes fixed upon the past, and sentimentally collecting empty bon-bon boxes, the contents of which his forefathers have devoured to the last crumb. He is the personification of the invincible narrowness of his class." "He is a good honest man," the Contessa said gently.