“Now, leave her be, honey. What’s that to you?” retorted Jennie in a sweet voice and hid the pillow behind Tamara’s back. “Wait, sweetie, I’d better sit with you for a while.”
She walked around the table, forced Boris to sit on a chair, and herself got up on his knees. Twining his neck with her arm, she pressed her lips to his mouth, so long and so vigorously that the student caught his breath. Right up close to his eyes he saw the eyes of the woman—strangely large, dark, luminous, indistinct and unmoving. For a quarter of a second or so, for an instant, it seemed to him that in these unliving eyes was impressed an expression of keen, mad hate; and the chill of terror, some vague premonition of an ominous, inevitable calamity flashed through the student’s brain. With difficulty tearing the supple arms of Jennie away from him, and pushing her away, he said, laughing, having turned red and breathing hard:
“There’s a temperament for you! Oh, you Messalina Paphnutievna! ... They call you Jennka, I think? You’re a good-looking little rascal.”
Platonov returned with Pasha. Pasha was pitiful and revolting to look at. Her face was pale, with, a bluish cast as though the blood had run off; the glazed, half-closed eyes were smiling with a faint, idiotic smile; the parted lips seemed to resemble two frayed, red, wet rags, and she walked with a sort of timid, uncertain step, just as though with one foot she were making a large step, and with the other a small one. She walked with docility up to the divan and with docility laid her head down on the pillow, without ceasing to smile faintly and insanely. Even at a distance it was apparent that she was cold.
“Pardon me, gentlemen, I am going to undress,” said Lichonin, and taking his coat off he threw it over the shoulders of the prostitute. “Tamara, give her chocolate and wine.”
Boris Sobashnikov again stood up picturesquely in the corner, in a leaning position, one leg in front of the other and his head held high. Suddenly he spoke amid the general silence, addressing Platonov directly, in a most foppish tone:
“Eh ... Listen ... what’s your name? ... This, then, must be your mistress? Eh?” And with the tip of his boot he pointed in the direction of the recumbent Pasha.
“Wha-at?” asked Platonov in a drawl, knitting his eyebrows.
“Or else you are her lover—it’s all one ... What do they call this duty here? Well, now, these same people for whom the women embroider shirts and with whom they divide their honest earnings? ... Eh? ...”
Platonov looked at him with a heavy, intent gaze through his narrowed lids.