Beside herself with delight, Mascha immediately hurries into Anna's room, and with sparkling eyes calls out:
"Anna, Anna, please come--see--Count Bärenburg--he has----"
"Well, what about him?" asks Anna, indifferently.
"He has sent me the bear-skin, you know, the skin of the bear which almost strangled Colia. It must have been a splendid bear. It has a head--a head----"
"Ah! that is very nice," replies Anna, without moving. "But I beg you, hurry a little with your dressing, and another time do not run into the hall with floating hair and in your dressing-sack, like a prima donna in the fifth act."
"H-m, she is jealous!" thinks Mascha. And shrugging her shoulders, with a triumphant smile on her fresh lips, she returns to her room, where she first completes her interrupted toilet, then crouches on the floor and sinks herself in contemplation of the bear.
Then Anna comes in to her--Anna, with quite a changed, sweet face. "Vinegar with sugar, we know that," thinks Mascha to herself, without rising from her strange position.
"Ah! that is the skin," says Anna, with condescending interest.
"Yes," says Mascha, slowly rising, with a humorous, quite childish impertinence, which would have forced a laugh from every unprejudiced spectator. "That is the skin, those are the flowers, there is the note."
"And you, indeed, take that for a proof of great admiration?" lisps Anna.