I felt sorry for her, awkward in her presence, and I wanted to ask her where her daughter was. After she had drunk some vodka and hot tea, she began to talk in a familiar, lively way, coarsely, like all the women of that street, but when I asked about her daughter she was sobered at once, and cried:
"What do you want to know for? No, my boy, you won't get hold of her; don't think it!"
She drank more, and then she said:
"I have nothing to do with my daughter. What am I? A laundress! What sort of a mother for her? She is well brought up, educated. That she is, my brother! She left me to live with a rich friend, as a teacher, like—"
After a silence she said:
"That's how it is! The laundress does n't please you, but the street-walker does?"
That she was a street-walker I had seen at once, of course. There was no other kind of woman in that street. But when she told me so herself, my eyes filled with tears of shame and pity for her. I felt as if she had burned me by making that admission,—she, who not long ago had been so brave, independent, and clever.
"Ekh! you!" she said, looking at me and sighing. "Go away from this place, I beg you! I urge you, don't come here, or you will be lost!"
Then she began to speak softly and brokenly, as if she were talking to herself, bending over the table and drawing figures on the tray with her fingers.
"But what are my entreaties and my advice to you? When my own daughter would not listen to me I cried to her: 'You can't throw aside your own mother. What are you thinking of?' And she—she said, 'I shall strangle myself!' And she went away to Kazan; she wants to learn to be a midwife. Good—good! But what about me? You see what I am now? What have I to cling to? And so I went on the streets."