"A charming creature, this Mascha," he thinks to himself. It pleases him to repeat her strange name to himself. "Yes, a charming creature. What a complexion, what a charming little mouth, and what a delightful expression, changing incessantly from petulance to moving tenderness, in her eyes! What shoulders! What a shame!"
Yes, what a shame to marry Marie Lensky. He could not think of it, but--why should he not be a little pleasant to her? What Count Bärenburg understands as being "a little pleasant," others would describe as paying desperate court to a girl. But he sees nothing of the sort, but takes the situation poetically.
"If only this silly Anna would not be so unbearably attentive!" thinks he, and still looks secretly over at Mascha.
She now stands near Lensky, before the mantel, pale, and with a treacherous redness of the heavy eyelids. With a kind but very earnest face, bending down to her, holding one of her small hands between his large ones, her father speaks very gently but impressively to her, evidently reproves her, and in a strange, melodious language, which goes to Bärenburg's heart, although he understands not a word of it, the wonderful Russian tongue which, like no other, contains and reflects the whole character of the people for whom it serves as expression.
After Lensky has finished his admonition, Maschenka, innocently unembarrassed, stretches out her arms to her father, and kisses him.
Meanwhile, Lensky, gently reproving her, says in French: "And now behave like a sensible being, Mascha. So! Sit up straight, and play something for us, now, before the people come."
"Yes, no evasions, only play. Rely on me, you may venture it," says Lensky. "I have been enough ashamed of you to-day, and, for a change, would like to be proud of you. Sit down--my heart--I take the risk; it will go!" And with that he raised the piano lid himself. "The A minor rondo of Mozart!"
For one instant she hesitated, then the wish to distinguish herself before Bärenburg, to please her father, comes to her. She plays, and how beautifully she plays!
As if electrified, Bärenburg rises and goes up to the piano. He has a great love for good music. The A minor rondo is his express favorite. In this composition of universal sadness, in which the purest artist soul which ever came down to us from heaven weeps over the frivolity of an entire century, Mascha's still immature but always tender and delicately shaded mastery is especially noticeable.