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. . . .

"Shall we be false to civic duty," Ivan Markovitch exclaimed
passionately, "if instead of punishing an erring boy we hold out
to him a helping hand?"

Ivan Markovitch talked further of family honour. He had not the
honour to belong to the Uskov family himself, but he knew their
distinguished family went back to the thirteenth century; he did
not forget for a minute, either, that his precious, beloved sister
had been the wife of one of the representatives of that name