“I’ve covered it,” says Zoe and turns over the trump which had been lying under the pack, wrong side up. “I’m going with forty, going with an ace of spades—a ten-spot, Mannechka, if you please. I’m through. Fifty-seven, eleven, sixty-eight. How much have you?”
“Thirty,” says Manka in an offended tone, pouting her lips; “oh, it’s all very well for you—you remember all the plays. Deal ... Well, what’s after that, Tamarochka?” she turns to her friend. “You talk on—I’m listening.”
Zoe shuffles the old, black, greasy cards, allows Manya to cut, then deals, having first spat upon her fingers.
Tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to Manya in a quiet voice, without dropping her sewing.
“We embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery—altar covers, palls, bishops’ vestments... With little grasses, with flowers, little crosses. In winter, you’d be sitting near a casement; the panes are small, with gratings, there isn’t much light, it smells of lamp oil, incense, cypress; you mustn’t talk—the mother superior was strict. Some one from weariness would begin droning a pre-Lenten first verse of a hymn ... ‘When I consider thy heavens ...’ We sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow out the windows—well, now, just like in a dream...”
Jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the cigarette over Zoe’s head, and says mockingly:
“We know all about your quiet life. You chucked the infants into toilets. The Evil One is always snooping around your holy places.”
“I call forty. 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 ...”