“Of course, for Sennechka.”

“What a treasure you’ve found, to be sure!  A miserable thief.  He rides up to this establishment like some general.  How is it he doesn’t beat you yet?  The thieves—­they like that.  And he plucks you, have no fear?”

“More than I want to, I won’t give,” meekly answers Tamara and bites the thread in two.

“Now that is just what I wonder at.  With your mind, your beauty, I would put such rings-around-a-rosie about a guest like that, that he’d take me and set me up.  I’d have horses of my own, and diamonds.”

“Everyone to his tastes, Jennechka.  You too, now, are a very pretty and darling girl, and your character is so independent and brave, and yet you and I have gotten stuck in Anna Markovna’s.”

Jennie flares up and answers with unsimulated bitterness: 

“Yes!  Why not!  All things come your way! ...You have all the very best guests.  You do what you want with them, but with me it’s always either old men or suckling babies.  I have no luck.  The ones are snotty, the others have yellow around the mouth.  More than anything else, now, I dislike the little boys.  He comes, the little varmint; he’s cowardly, he hurries, he trembles, but having done the business, he doesn’t know what to do with his eyes for shame.  He’s all squirming from disgust.  I just feel like giving him one in the snout.  Before giving you the rouble, he holds it in his pocket in his fist, and that rouble’s all hot, even sweaty.  The milksop!  His mother gives him a ten kopeck piece for a French roll with sausage, but he’s economized out of that for a wench.  I had one little cadet in the last few days.  So just on purpose, to spite him, I say:  ’Here, my dearie, here’s a little caramel for you on your way; when you’re going back to your corps, you’ll suck on it.’  So at first he got offended, but afterwards took it.  Later I looked from the stoop, on purpose; just as soon as he walked out, he looked around, and right away into his mouth with the caramel.  The little swine!”

“But with old men it’s still worse,” says Little Manka in a tender voice, and slyly looks at Zoe.  “What do you think, Zoinka?”

Zoe, who had already finished playing, and was just about to yawn, now cannot in any way give rein to her yawns.  She does not know whether she wants to be angry or to laugh.  She has a steady visitor, some little old man in a high station, with perverted erotic habits.  The entire establishment makes fun of his visits to her.

Zoe at last succeeds in yawning.

“To the devil’s dam with all of you,” she says, with her voice hoarse after the yawn; “may he be damned, the old anathema!”