“I would teach her if she was my wife.”
The cheesemonger made a gesture of despair, and the porter said to himself that there was nothing suspicious about him; that he was simply a fellow without backbone and a fool, qualities which seemed to account for Koboseff’s incompetence as a business man.
“Well, Clanya,” Pavel said to Mlle. Yavner, lazily addressing her in the diminutive of his own coining. “I am afraid I shall have to exile you for some time.”
“Exile me?” she asked absently without lifting her eyes from a heap of type she was sorting and putting up in packages. She sat across the table from the sofa upon which he was cuddling himself drowsily as a cat does before a fireside.
“Yes, that’s what I’ll have to do—pack you off, put you in a box, nail you up tight, stick a label on it and ship you somewhere. ‘To places not so very distant,’” he added, mocking the official phrase used in transporting people to eastern Siberia.
She raised her eyes from her work, her fingers stiff and black with lead dust. “What are you driving at, Pasha? Anything up? Or is it merely one of those jokes under which one must write in big letters: ‘This is a joke?’”
“Is that a joke?” he asked, and burst into laughter.
She resumed her work. The type she was sorting was intended for a revolutionary printing office, having been sent to St. Petersburg by Masha Safonoff, who had bought it of the foreman of the government’s printing office in Miroslav.
“Oh, to all the diabolical devils with that type of yours, Clanya. Can’t you sit down by a fellow’s side for a minute or two?”