"Oh, the scoundrel! See what he is doing!" said the red-headed woman, pressing her face against the grating, her whole massive frame shaking.
"What is that drum-hide shouting about?" said Korableva, shaking her head at the red-haired woman, and then again turning to Maslova. "How many years?"
"Four," said Maslova, and the flow of her tears was so copious that one of them fell on the cigarette. She angrily crushed it, threw it away and took another.
The watch-woman, although she was no smoker, immediately picked up the cigarette-end and began to straighten it, talking at the same time.
"As I said to Matveievna, dear," she said, "it is ill-luck. They do what they please. And we thought they would discharge you. Matveievna said you would be discharged, and I said that you would not, I said. 'My heart tells me,' I said, 'that they will condemn her,' and so it happened," she went on, evidently listening to the sounds of her own voice with particular pleasure.
The prisoners had now passed through the court-yard, and the four women left the window and approached Maslova. The larged-eyed illicit seller of spirits was the first to speak.
"Well, is the sentence very severe?" she asked, seating herself near Maslova and continuing to knit her stocking.
"It is severe because she has no money. If she had money to hire a good lawyer, I am sure they would not have held her," said Korableva. "That lawyer—what's his name?—that clumsy, big-nosed one can, my dear madam, lead one out of the water dry. That's the man you should take."
"To hire him!" grinned Miss Dandy. "Why, he would not look at you for less than a thousand rubles."
"It seems to be your fate," said the old woman who was charged with incendiarism. "I should say he is severe! He drove my boy's wife from her; put him in jail, and me, too, in my old age," for the hundredth time she began to repeat her story. "Prison and poverty are our lot. If it is not prison, it is poverty."