girl who did not feel envy toward the fat Kitty, and did not experience a painful, keen, vertiginous curiosity.  When Dyadchenko was going away half an hour later—­with his sedate and stern air, all the women speechlessly, with their mouths gaping, escorted him. to the street door and afterwards watched him from the windows as he walked along the street.  Then they rushed into the room of the dressing Kitty and overwhelmed her with interrogations.  They looked with a new feeling, almost with astonishment, at her bare, red, thick arms, at the bed, still crumpled, at the old, greasy, paper rouble, which Kitty showed them, having taken it out of her stocking.  Kitty could tell them nothing.  “A man like any man, like all men,” she said with a calm incomprehension; but when she found out who her visitor had been, she suddenly burst into tears, without herself knowing why.

This man, the outcast of outcasts, fallen as low as the fancy of man can picture, this voluntary headsman, had treated her without rudeness, but with such absence of even a hint at endearment, with such disdain and wooden indifference, as no human being is treated; not even a dog or a horse, and not even an umbrella, overcoat or hat, but like some dirty, unclean object, for which a momentary, unavoidable need arises, but which, at the passing of its needfulness, becomes foreign, useless, and disgusting.  The entire horror of this thought the fat Kate could not embrace with her brain of a fattened turkey hen, and because of that cried—­as it seemed even to her—­without cause and reason.

There were also other happenings, which stirred up the turbid, foul life of these poor, sick, silly, unfortunate women.  There were cases of savage, unbridled jealousy with pistol shots and poisoning; occasionally, very rarely, a tender, flaming and pure love would blossom out upon this dung; occasionally the women even abandoned an establishment with the help of the loved man, but almost always came back.  Two or three times it happened that a woman from a brothel would suddenly prove pregnant—­and this always seemed, on the face of it, laughable and disgraceful, but touching in the profundity of the event.

And no matter what may have happened, every evening brought with it such an irritating, strained, spicy expectation of adventures that every other life, after that in a house of ill-fame, would have seemed flat and humdrum to these lazy women of no will power.

CHAPTER V.

The windows are opened wide to the fragrant darkness of the evening, and the tulle curtains stir faintly back and forth from the imperceptible movement of the air.  It smells of dewy grass from the consumptive little garden in front of the house, and just the least wee bit of lilac and the withering birch leaves of the little trees placed near the entrance because of the Trinity.  Liuba, in a blue velvet blouse with low cut bosom, and Niura, dressed as a “baby,” in a pink, wide sacque to the knees, with her bright hair loose and with little curls on her forehead, are lying embraced on the window-sill, and are singing in a low voice a song about the hospital, which song is the rage of the day and exceedingly well known among prostitutes.  Niura, through her nose, leads in a high voice.