“Bosh! ...  That can’t be...”  Kolya cut her short curtly.  “But, however, that’s enough—­I’m going away!”

“Go away, do me that favour!  I’ve ten roubles lying there, near the mirror, in a little box from chocolates—­take them for yourself.  I don’t need them, anyway.  Buy with them a tortoise powder box with a gold setting for your mamma; and if you have a little sister, buy her a good doll.  Say:  in memory from a certain wench that died.  Go on, little boy!”

Kolya, with a frown, angry, with one shove of a well-knit body jumped off the bed, almost without touching it.  Now he was standing on the little mat near the bed, naked, well-formed, splendid in all the magnificence of his blooming, youthful body.

“Kolya!” Jennka called him quietly, insistently and caressingly.  “Kolechka!”

He turned around to her call, and drew in the air in a short, jerky gust, as though he had gasped:  he had never yet in his life met anywhere, even in pictures, such a beautiful expression of tenderness, sorrow, and womanly silent reproach, as the one he was just now beholding in the eyes of Jennka, filled with tears.  He sat down on the edge of the bed, and impulsively embraced her around the bared, swarthy arms.

“Let’s not quarrel, then, Jennechka,” he said tenderly.

And she twined herself around him, placed her arms on his neck, while her head she pressed against his breast.  They kept silent so for several seconds.

“Kolya,” Jennie suddenly asked dully, “but were you never afraid of becoming infected?”

Kolya shivered.  Some chill, loathsome horror stirred and glided through within his soul.  He did not answer at once.

“Of course, that would be horrible... horrible...  God save me!  But then I go only to you alone, only to you!  You’d surely have told me? ...”

“Yes, I’d have told you,” she uttered meditatively.  And at once rapidly, consciously, as though having weighed the significance of her words:  “Yes, of course, of course, I would have told you!  But haven’t you ever heard what sort of a thing is that disease called syphilis?”

“Of course, I’ve heard...  The nose falls through...”

“No, Kolya, not only the nose!  The person becomes all diseased:  his bones, sinews, brains grow diseased...  Some doctors say such nonsense as that it’s possible to be cured of this disease.  Bosh!  You’ll never cure yourself!  A person rots ten, twenty, thirty years.  Every second paralysis can strike him down, so that the right side of the face, the right arm, the right leg die—­it isn’t a human being that’s living, but some sort of a little half.  Half-man-half-corpse.  The majority of them go out of their minds.  And each understands... every person... each one so infected understands, that if he eats, drinks, kisses, simply even breathes—­he can’t be sure that he won’t immediately infect some one of those around him, the very nearest—­sister, wife,