Mascha stares with wide eyes at the picture. "Who stood model for it?" murmurs she.
"A little seamstress."
"How content she looks. Do you believe that a dead person can look so satisfied?" Mascha speaks as softly and solemnly as if a true corpse were before her.
"The drowned girl in the morgue had this expression. Besides, I have often noticed it in dead people. Have you never seen a corpse?"
"Never!" says Mascha, shaking her head--"never!"
"Not even your mother?"
"Not even she--I would not. I was afraid." And seizing Nita convulsively by the wrist, she asked breathlessly: "Nita, do you believe that there is a second life after this one?"
If anyone else had asked this question of Nita, she would probably have answered all kinds of things. To the child, evidently tormented by anxiety, she only answered earnestly and simply: "Yes," whereupon she added: "And now come away from the horrid picture. I would not have asked you to look at it if I had not forgotten what a nervous little person you are. Now make yourself comfortable. You will spend the afternoon with me." And Nita wished to take her hat.
Mascha pushed her off. "I must go, I must go," she repeated, with the same hasty uneasiness. Suddenly she herself took off her hat. "Only a little while--a little while," she whispered. "Sit down in the arm-chair, Nita, so, and I here." She crouched down on a cushion at her friend's feet; then laying her head down on Nita's knees, she begs: "And now love me a little; be good to me, very good; you can be so well!"
It is very close even here in the large, airy studio. Already Nita believes that Mascha has fallen asleep, when she murmurs: "What do you call it?"