rty. 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?"

"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.