The police sergeant asked:
“Are you the cook? Or the laundress? What a nice piece of sugar-candy you are!”
He burst into a shrill, neighing laugh, and was about to begin his offensively affectionate tactics—he lifted his open, tawny hand, and aimed his forefinger with a black border on a thick yellow finger-nail towards a place where he might jab, pinch, or tickle the barefoot, bare-armed girl. But Zinaida, smiling and frowning at the same time, edged away from him and answered:
“I’m an instructress in this school—Zinaida Ouzlova.”
The sergeant drawled out:
“An instructress! You are fibbing!”
He did not believe at first that she was an instructress. He thought that she was the cook, or the washerwoman, who had tucked up her dress in order to wash, scour, or cook more conveniently; and that she was joking with him. But after he had scrutinized her face more intently, a face such as a cook does not have, and her hands, such as a washerwoman does not have—he suddenly believed.
With astonishment and curiosity Zinaida eyed this strange, coarse, offensively affectionate creature with the heavy sabre in a black sheath dangling about his legs, and asked:
“And who are you?”
The sergeant replied with a very important air: