All this was displeasing to me. I saw that I was losing my friends, and it seemed to me that the person to blame was Ludmilla. One evening when I was in the yard going over the collection of bones and rags and all kinds of rubbish, she came to me, swaying from side to side and waving her right hand.
"How do you do?" she said, bowing her head three times. "Has Kostrom been with you? And Tchurka?"
"Tchurka is not friends with us now. It is all your fault. They are both in love with you and they have quarreled."
She blushed, but answered mockingly:
"What next! How is it my fault?"
"Why do you make them fall in love with you?"
"I did not ask them to," she said crossly, and as she went away she added: "It is all nonsense. I am older than they are; I am fourteen. People do not fall in love with big girls."
"A lot you know!" I cried, wishing to hurt her. "What about the shopkeeper, Xlistov's sister? She is quite old, and still she has the boys after her."
Ludmilla turned on me, sticking her crutch deep into the sand of the yard.
"You don't know anything yourself," she said quickly, with tears in her voice and her pretty eyes flashing finely. "That shopkeeper is a bad woman, and I—what am I? I am still a little girl; and—but you ought to read that novel, 'Kamchadalka," the second part, and then you would have something to talk about."