“Fatty,” Vera, dressed as a jockey, wheedled the sub-professor, clambering up on his knees, “I have a friend, only she’s sick and can’t come out into the drawing room. I’ll carry her some apples and chocolate. Will you let me?”
“Well, now, those are all just stories about a friend! But above all, don’t be thrusting your tenderness at me. Sit as smart children sit, right here alongside, on the arm chair, just so. And fold your little hands.”
“Ah, but what if I can’t!” writhed Vera in coquetry, rolling her eyes up under her upper lids ... “When you are so nice.”
But Lichonin, in answer to this professional beggary, only nodded his head gravely and good-naturedly, just like Emma Edwardovna, and repeated over and over again, mimicking her German accent:
“Itt can pe done, itt can pe done, itt can pe done...”
“Then I will tell the waiter, honey, to carry my friend some sweets and apples?” pestered Vera.
Such importunity entered the round of their tacit duties. There even existed among the girls some captious, childish, strange rivalry as to the ability to “ease a guest of his money”—strange enough because they did not derive any profit out of this, unless, indeed, a certain affection from the housekeeper or a word of approbation from the proprietress. But in their petty, monotonous, habitually frivolous life there was, in general, a great deal of semi-puerile, semi-hysterical play.
Simeon brought a coffee pot, cups, a squatty bottle of Benedictine, fruits and bon-bons in glass vases, and gaily and easily began making the corks of the beer and wine pop.
“But why don’t you drink?” Yarchenko turned to the reporter Platonov. “Allow me ... I do not mistake? Sergei Ivanovich, I believe?”
“Right.”