“It’s the truth you’re telling, Jennka!  I had a certain old bugger, too.  He made me pretend all the time that I was an innocent girl, so’s I’d cry and scream.  But, Jennechka, though you’re the smartest one of us, yet I’ll bet you won’t guess who he was ...”

“The warden of a prison?”

“A fire chief.”

Suddenly Katie burst into laughter in her bass: 

“Well, now, I had a certain teacher.  He taught some kind of arithmetic, I disremember which.  He always made me believe, that I was the man, and he the woman, and that I should do it to him ... by force ...  And what a fool!  Just imagine, girls, he’d yell all the time:  ‘I’m your woman!  I’m all yours!  Take me!  Take me!’”

“Loony!” said the blue-eyed, spry Verka in a positive and unexpectedly contralto voice:  “Loony.”

“No, why?” suddenly retorted the kindly and modest Tamara.  “Not crazy at all, but simply, like all men, a libertine.  At home it’s tiresome for him, while here for his money he can receive whatever pleasure he desires.  That’s plain, it seems?”

Jennka, who had been silent up to now, suddenly, with one quick movement sat up in bed.

“You’re all fools!” she cried.  “Why do you forgive them all this?  Before I used to be foolish myself, too, but now I compel them to walk before me on all fours, compel them to kiss my soles, and they do this with delight ...  You all know, girlies, that I don’t love money, but I pluck the men in whatever way I can.  They, the nasty beasts, present me with the portraits of their wives, brides, mothers, daughters ...  However, you’ve seen, I think, the photographs in our water-closet?  But now, just think of it, my children ...  A woman loves only once, but for always, while a man loves like a he-greyhound...  That he’s unfaithful is nothing; but he never has even the commonest feeling of gratitude left either for the old, or the new, mistress.  I’ve heard it said, that now there are many clean boys among the young people.  I believe this, though I haven’t seen, haven’t met them, myself.  But all those I have seen are all vagabonds, nasty brutes and skunks.  Not so long ago I read some novel of our miserable life.  It’s almost the same thing as I’m telling you now.”

Vanda came back.  She slowly, carefully, sat down on the edge of Jennka’s bed; there, where the shadow of the lamp fell.  Out of that deep, though deformed psychical delicacy, which is peculiar to people sentenced to death, prisoners at hard labour, and prostitutes, none had the courage to ask her how she had passed this hour and a half.  Suddenly she threw upon the table twenty-five roubles and said: 

“Bring me white wine and a watermelon.”

And, burying her face in her arms, which had sunk on the table, she began to sob inaudibly.  And again no one took the liberty of putting any question to her.  Only Jennka grew pale from wrath and bit her lower lip so that a row of white spots was left upon it.