This general came accurately twice a month, every two weeks (just as to Zoe, another girl, came daily another honoured guest, nicknamed the Director in the house).
Jennka suddenly threw the old, tattered book behind her. Her brown eyes flared up with a real golden fire.
“You’re wrong in despising this general,” said she. “I’ve known worse Ethiopians. I had a certain guest once—a real blockhead. He couldn’t make love to me otherwise than ... otherwise than ... well, let’s say it plainly: he pricked me with pins in the breast ... While in Vilno a Polish Catholic priest used to come to me. He would dress me all in white, compel me to powder myself, lay me down on the bed. He’d light three candles near me. And then, when I seemed to him altogether like a dead woman, he’d throw himself upon me.”
Little White Manka suddenly exclaimed:
“It’s the truth you’re telling, Jennka! I had a certain old bugger, too. He made me pretend all the time that I was an innocent girl, so’s I’d cry and scream. But, Jennechka, though you’re the smartest one of us, yet I’ll bet you won’t guess who he was ...”
“The warden of a prison?”
“A fire chief.”
Suddenly Katie burst into laughter in her bass:
“Well, now, I had a certain teacher. He taught some kind of arithmetic, I disremember which. He always made me believe, that I was the man, and he the woman, and that I should do it to him ... by force ... And what a fool! Just imagine, girls, he’d yell all the time: ‘I’m your woman! I’m all yours! Take me! Take me!’”
“Loony!” said the blue-eyed, spry Verka in a positive and unexpectedly contralto voice: “Loony.”