Since there was no time left before the midday meal to buy a roast in honor of the festive occasion, dinner consisted of cabbage as usual, with the addition of a mountain of cakes from the confectioner's, to which the girls helped themselves before the meal in order to lay some aside for days of less plenty. This was the first evidence of their housekeeperly thrift. Mrs. Asmussen beamed with motherly joy and tenderness. "Well," she said, "did I exaggerate when I told you about these glorious creatures? Too bad I had to do without them for so long. But I am modest in my demands, and I am glad enough to get what I do. I know their hearts draw them now to their father, now to their mother, because they cannot make up their minds to deprive either of us permanently of the gift of their pure filial love." She was sitting between the girls, and she pressed a hand of each. All three looked into one another's eyes devotedly. The absent pater familias was remembered touchingly. Their gay, talented father, the girls said, intended to give up his large business, to assume the management of extensive farms in the south of Russia at the urgent invitation of influential patrons. Later, in Mrs. Asmussen's gloomier hours, it transpired that that "pock-marked scoundrel" had had to scurry off because of some questionable notes, and hide in Odessa until the atmosphere in the north cleared. To Lilly's unpracticed eye the girls were as like as two sparrows--saucy, greedy, inconstant, and amorous. It was only after a time that she learned to distinguish between them. Lona, the older, who possessed some beauty of a coarse kind, had the ways of a clutching, grasping barmaid, and was the sharper of the two, usually dragging her sister Mi in tow, whose chief characteristic was a sort of flabby drollness. In their treatment of Lilly they observed for the time being the pacific attitude of suspicion willing to bide its time. Hints were not omitted to inform a certain person that they would soon learn what position to take and whether there was to be peace or war. When they were finally convinced that Lilly was shy and harmless, the waves of their tender confidences met over her head. It now became the regular thing for all three of them to sit on the edge of the bed until late at night with their corsets open and their knees drawn up to their chins, talking, talking, talking, while they sucked candies bought on the sly, or dressed one another's hair. Beautiful souls poured forth confessions. Whispered confidences about love adventures and man-baiting flowed on steadily, flooding Lilly's pure fancy with a turbid stream of sexual mysteries. What the Asmussen girls liked above all was to have their bodies admired. "When I turn this way, isn't the set of my shoulders classic?" "Haven't I a marble bosom?" "If I weren't so bashful, I'd take off my shirt and show you my hips. They are like a goddess's."