Tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to Manya in a quiet voice, without dropping her sewing.

“We embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery—­altar covers, palls, bishops’ vestments...  With little grasses, with flowers, little crosses.  In winter, you’d be sitting near a casement; the panes are small, with gratings, there isn’t much light, it smells of lamp oil, incense, cypress; you mustn’t talk—­the mother superior was strict.  Some one from weariness would begin droning a pre-Lenten first verse of a hymn ...  ’When I consider thy heavens ...’  We sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow out the windows—­well, now, just like in a dream...”

Jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the cigarette over Zoe’s head, and says mockingly: 

“We know all about your quiet life.  You chucked the infants into toilets.  The Evil One is always snooping around your holy places.”

“I call forty.  I had forty-six.  Finished!” Little Manka exclaims excitedly and claps her palms.  “I open with three.”

Tamara, smiling at Jennie’s words, answers with a scarcely perceptible smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes little, sly, ambiguous depressions at their corners, altogether as with Monna Lisa in the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

“Lay folk say a lot of things about nuns ...  Well, even if there had been sin once in a while ...”

“If you don’t sin—­you don’t repent,” Zoe puts in seriously, and wets her finger in her mouth.

“You sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from standing in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your legs ache.  And at evening there is service again.  You knock at the door of the mother superior’s cell:  ’Through prayers of Thy saints, oh Lord, our Father, have mercy upon us.’  And the mother superior would answer from the cell, in a little bass-like ‘A-men.’”

Jennie looks at her intently for some time, shakes her head and says with great significance: 

“You’re a queer girl, Tamara.  Here I’m looking at you and wondering.  Well, now, I can understand how these fools, on the manner of Sonka, play at love.  That’s what they’re fools for.  But you, it seems, have been roasted on all sorts of embers, have been washed in all sorts of lye, and yet you allow yourself foolishness of that sort.  What are you embroidering that shirt for?”

Tamara, without haste, with a pin refastens the fabric more conveniently on her knee, smooths the seam down with the thimble, and speaks, without raising the narrowed eyes, her head bent just a trifle to one side: 

“One’s got to be doing something.  It’s wearisome just so.  I don’t play at cards, and I don’t like them.”

Jennie continues to shake her head.

“No, you’re a queer girl, really you are.  You always have more from the guests than all of us get.  You fool, instead of saving money, what do you spend it on?  You buy perfumes at seven roubles the bottle.  Who needs it?  And now you have bought fifteen roubles’ worth of silk.  Isn’t this for your Senka, now?”