indignant voice of Emma Edwardovna sounds
in the room. "Well, where did you see that respectable girls should
allow themselves to climb out of the windows and holler all over the
street. O, scandal! And it's all Niura, and it's always this horrible
Niura!"

She is majestic in her black dress, with her yellow flabby face, with
the dark pouches under her eyes, with the three pendulous, quivering
chins. The girls, like boarding school misses, staidly seat themselves
on the chairs along the walls, except Jennie, who continues to
contemplate herself in all the mirrors. Two more cabbies drive up
opposite, to the house of Sophia Vasilievna. Yama is beginning to liven
up. At last one more victoria rattles along the paved road and its
noise is cut short abruptly at the entrance to Anna Markovna's.

The porter Simeon helps someone take off his things in the front hall.
Jennie looks in there, holding on with both hands to the door jambs,
but immediately turns back, and as she walks shrugs her shoulders and
shakes her head negatively.

"Don't know him, someone who's an entire stranger," she says in a low
voice. "He has never been in our place. Some daddy or other, fat, in
gold eye-glasses and a uniform."

Emma Edwardovna commands in a voice which sounds like a summoning
cavalry trumpet:

"Ladies, into the drawing room! Into the drawing room, ladies!"

One after the other, with haughty gaits, into the drawing room enter:
Tamara, with bare white arms and bared neck, wound with a string of
artificial pearls; fat Kitty with her fleshy, quadrangular face and low
forehead--she, too, is in decollete, but her skin is red and in
goose-pimples; Nina, the very newest one, pug-nosed and clumsy, in a
dress the colour of a green parrot; another Manka--Big Manka, or Manka
the Crocodile, as they call her, and--the last--Sonka the Rudder, a
Jewess, with an ugly dark face and an extraordinarily large nose,
precisely for which she has received her nickname, but with such
magnificent large eyes, at the same time meek and sad, burning and
humid, as, among the women of all the terrestrial globe, are to be
found only among the Jewesses.

CHAPTER VI.

The elderly guest in the uniform of the Department of Charity walked in
with slow, undecided steps, at each step bending his body a little
forward and rubbing his palms with a circular motion, as though washing
them. Since all the women were pompously silent, as though not noticing
him, he