his little room: the twenty-four hours
round, day and night, the little holy lamp burns before the images.
He's very strong for God ... Only I think that he's that way because
there's heavy sins upon him. He's a murderer."

"What are you saying?"

"Oh, let's drop talking about him, Liubochka. Well, let's go on further:

"I'll go to the drug store, buy me some poison, And I will poison then
meself."

Niura starts off in a very high, thin voice.

Jennie walks back and forth in the room, with arms akimbo, swaying as
she walks, and looking at herself in all the mirrors. She has on a
short orange satin dress, with straight deep pleats in the skirt, which
vacillates evenly to the left and right from the movement of her hips.
Little Manka, a passionate lover of card games, ready to play from
morning to morning, without stopping, is playing away at "sixty-six"
with Pasha, during which both women, for convenience in dealing, have
left an empty chair between them, while they gather their tricks into
their skirts, spread out between their knees. Manka has on a brown,
very modest dress, with black apron and pleated black bib; this dress
is very becoming to her dainty, fair little head and small stature; it
makes her younger and gives her the appearance of a high-school
undergraduate.

Her partner Pasha is a very queer and unhappy girl. She should have
been, long ago, not in a house of ill-fame, but in a psychiatric ward,
because of an excruciating nervous malady, which compels her to give
herself up, frenziedly, with an unwholesome avidity, to any man
whatsoever who may choose her, even the most repulsive. Her mates make
sport of her and despise her somewhat for this vice, just as though for
some treason to their corporate enmity toward men. Niura, with very
great versimilitude, mimics her sighs, groans, outcries and passionate
words, from which she can never refrain in the moments of ecstasy and
which are to be heard in the neighbouring rooms through two or three
partitions. There is a rumour afloat about Pasha, that she got into a
brothel not at all through necessity or temptation or deception, but
had gone into it her own self, voluntarily, following her horrible,
insatiable instinct. But the proprietress of the house and both the
housekeepers indulge Pasha in every way and encourage her insane
weakness, because, thanks to it, Pasha is in constant demand and earns
four, five times as much as any one of the remaining girls