“Don’t be afraid, Kirsha—these are dead words.”
Kirsha silently nodded his head.
A mistress and her servant-maid walked together and exchanged quarrelsome words.
“God didn’t make all the trees in the forest alike. I am a white bone, you are a black bone. I am a gentlewoman, you are a peasant-woman.”
“You may be a gentlewoman, yet trash.”
“Maybe trash, but still from the gentry.”
Quite close to the magic line there was an apparent effort on the part of an elegantly dressed woman and a young man of the breed of dandies to emerge from the general throng. They had been only recently buried, and they exhaled the odour of fresh corpses. The woman coquettishly moved her half-putrefied lips and complained in a hoarse, creaking voice:
“They’ve forced us to walk with all these Khams.[16] They might have let us walk separately from all this common folk.”
The dandy suddenly complained in a squeaking voice:
“Be careful, there, muzhik, don’t nudge. What a dirty fellow!”