And now she could not understand why it was that her son and his friends were socialists.
When they had all departed, she asked Pavel: "Pavlusha, are you a socialist ?" "Yes," he said, standing before her, straight and stalwart as always.
"Why ?" The mother heaved a heavy sigh, and lowering her eyes, said: "So, Pavlusha?
Why, they are against the Czar; they killed one." Pavel walked up and down the room, ran his hand across his face, and, smiling, said: "We don't need to do that!" He spoke to her for a long while in a low, serious voice.

She looked into his face and thought: "He will do nothing bad; he is incapable of doing bad!" And thereafter the terrible word was repeated with increasing frequency; its sharpness wore off, and it became as familiar to her ear as scores of other words unintelligible to her.

But Sashenka did not please her, and when she came the mother felt troubled and ill at ease.
Once she said to the Little Russian, with an expression of dissatisfaction about the mouth: "What a stern person this Sashenka is! Flings her commands around!--You must do this and you must do that!" The Little Russian laughed aloud.
"Well said, mother! You struck the nail right on the head! Hey, Pavel ?" And with a wink to the mother, he said with a jovial gleam in his eyes: "You can't drain the blue blood out of a person even with a pump!" Pavel remarked dryly: "She is a good woman!" His face glowered.
"And that's true, too!" the Little Russian corroborated.

"Only she does not understand that she ought to----" They started up an argument about something the mother did not understand.

The mother noticed, also, that Sashenka was most stern with Pavel, and that sometimes she even scolded him.