"Yes, indeed!" Ivan assented, and laughed aloud.
The mother looked carefully about her, and called out:
"Sour cabbage soup! Hot vermicelli soup! Roast meat!"
Then deftly and secretly taking out one package of books after the other, she shoved them into the hands of the brothers. Each time a bundle disappeared from her hands, the sickly, sneering face of the officer of gendarmes flashed up before her like a yellow stain, like the flame of a match in a dark room, and she said to him in her mind, with a feeling of malicious pleasure:
"Take this, sir!" And when she handed over the last package she added with an air of satisfaction: "And here is some more, take it!"
Workmen came up to her with cups in their hands, and when they were near Ivan and Vasily, they began to laugh aloud. The mother calmly suspended the transfer of the books, and poured sour soup and vermicelli soup, while the Gusevs joked her.
"How cleverly Nilovna does her work!"
"Necessity drives one even to catching mice," remarked a stoker somberly. "They have snatched away your breadgiver, the scoundrels! Well, give us three cents' worth of vermicelli. Never mind, mother! You'll pull through!"