“All right! Let’s get out of here for a minute. I’ll tell you everything. Girls, wait for us a little while.”
In the light corridor Jennka laid her hands on the shoulders of her mate and with a distorted, suddenly blanched face, said:
“Well, then, listen here: some one has infected me with syphilis.”
“Oh, my poor darling. Long?”
“Long. Do you remember, when the students were here? The same ones who started a row with Platonov? I found out about it for the first time then. I found out in the daytime.”
“Do you know,” quietly remarked Tamara, “I almost guessed about this, and particularly then, when you went down on your knees before the singer and talked quietly about something with her. But still, my dear Jennechka, you must attend to yourself.”
Jennka wrathfully stamped her foot and tore in half the batiste handkerchief which she had been nervously crumpling in her hands.
“No! Not for anything! I won’t infect any one of you. You may have noticed yourself, that during the last weeks I don’t dine at the common table, and that I wash and wipe the dishes myself. That’s why I’m trying to break Manka away from me, whom, you know, I love sincerely, in the real way. But these two-legged skunks I infect purposely, infect every evening, ten, fifteen of them. Let them rot, let them carry the syphilis on to their wives, mistresses, mothers—yes, yes, their mothers also, and their fathers, and their governesses, and even their grand-grandmothers. Let them all perish, the honest skunks!”
Tamara carefully and tenderly stroked Jennka’s head. “Can it be that you’ll go the limit, Jennechka?”
“Yes. And without any mercy. All of you, however, don’t have to be afraid of me. I choose the man myself. The stupidest, the handsomest, the richest and the most important, but not to one of you will I let them go afterward. Oh! I make believe I’m so passionate before them, that you’d burst out laughing if you saw. I bite them, I scratch, I cry and shiver like an insane woman. They believe it, the pack of fools.”