...of discretion

She had heard from relations that something was happening to Serezha. She was aware of everything, beginning with the name of Serezha's flame, Olga, and ending with the fact that the latter was happily married to an engineer. She did not ask her brother any questions. Acting thus from conventional discretion, she, like a luminary, ascribed it to a special virtue of her caste. She did not question Serezha, but, breathing the awareness that his story should be submitted to that thoughtful and sensitive principle which she herself personified, she waited for him to break his silence and to open his heart to her of his own accord. She laid claim to his sudden confession, awaiting it with professional impatience; and who will laugh at her if he take into account that her brother's story had in it the element of free love, a dramatic clash with the conventional bonds of matrimony, and the right of a strong healthy feeling and, Heavens, almost the whole of Leonid Andreyev. In the meantime, bridled banality affected Serezha more violently than unbridled and sparking stupidity. And when once he could not contain himself, his sister interpreted his evasiveness in her own way and, from his reluctant omissions, deduced that everything had gone wrong between the lovers. Then her feeling of competence grew stronger because now, to the above attractive inventory, was added what was to her the necessary element of drama. For, however remote her brother might have been to her as a result of his having been born five years and some months later than her generation, she had eyes in her head and she perceived unmistakably that Serezha had no inherent propensity for folly and mischief. And the word 'drama', which Natasha spread among her acquaintances, was the only one not borrowed from her brother's vocabulary.

[The Last Summer, Pasternak, B.]