“He’s gone... Brrr! ...”
Platonov was looking at Jennie with extraordinary attentiveness. He distinguished her from the rest of the girls and almost respected her for her abrupt, refractory, and impudently mocking character. And now, turning around occasionally, by her flaming, splendid eyes, by the vividly and unevenly glowing unhealthy red of her cheeks, by the much bitten parched lips, he felt that her great, long ripening rancour was heavily surging within the girl and suffocating her. And it was then that he thought (and subsequently often recalled this) that he had never yet seen Jennie so radiantly beautiful as on this night. He also noticed, that all the men present in the private cabinet, with the exception of Lichonin, were looking at her—some frankly, others by stealth and as though in passing—with curiosity and furtive desire. The beauty of this woman, together with the thought of her altogether easy accessibility, at any minute, agitated their imagination.
“There’s something working upon you, Jennie,” said Platonov quietly.
Caressingly, she just barely drew her fingers over his arm.
“Don’t pay any attention. Just so ... our womanish affairs ... It won’t be interesting to you.”
But immediately, turning to Tamara, she passionately and rapidly began saying something in an agreed jargon, which presented a wild mixture out of the Hebrew, Tzigani and Roumanian tongues and the cant words of thieves and horse-thieves.
“Don’t try to put anything over on the fly guy, the fly guy is next,” Tamara cut her short and with a smile indicated the reporter with her eyes.
Platonov had, in fact, understood. Jennie was telling with indignation that during this day and night, thanks to the influx of a cheap public, the unhappy Pashka had been taken into a room more than ten times—and all by different men. Only just now she had had a hysterical fit, ending in a faint. And now, scarcely having brought Pashka back to consciousness and braced her up on valerian drops in a glass of spirits, Emma Edwardovna had again sent her into the drawing room. Jennie had attempted to take the part of her comrade, but the house-keeper had cursed the intercessor out and had threatened her with punishment.
“What is it all about?” asked Yarchenko in perplexity, raising high his eyebrows.
“Don’t trouble yourself ... nothing out of the way...” answered Jennie in a still agitated voice. “Just so ... our little family trifles ... Sergei Ivanich, may I have some of your wine?”