“Just so. I know of nothing more uncanny than this fusion of fully sincere devoutness with an innate leaning toward crime. Shall I confess to you? I, when I talk all alone to Simeon—and we talk with each other long and leisurely, for hours—I experience at moments a genuine terror. A superstitious terror! Just as though, for instance, I am standing in the dusk upon a shaking little board, bending over some dark, malodorous well, and just barely distinguish how there, at the bottom, reptiles are stirring. And yet, he is devout in a real way, and I am sure will some time join the monks and will be a great faster and sayer of prayers, and the devil knows how, in what monstrous fashion, a real religious ecstasy will entwine in his soul with blasphemy, with scoffing at sacred things, with some repulsive passion or other, with sadism or something else of that nature!” “However, you do not spare the object of your observations,” said Yarchenko, and carefully indicated the girls with his eyes. “Eh, it’s all the same. Our relations are cool now.” “How so?” asked Volodya Pavlov, who had caught the end of the conversation. “Just so ... It isn’t even worth the telling...” smiled the reporter evasively. “A trifle ... Let’s have your glass here, Mr. Yarchenko.” But the precipitate Niura, who could never keep her tongue behind her teeth, suddenly shot oat in rapid patter: “It’s because Sergei Ivanich gave him one in the snout ... On account of Ninka. A certain old man came to Ninka ... And stayed for the night ... And Ninka had the flowers ... And the old man was torturing her all the time ... So Ninka started crying and ran away.”[6] [6] The Russian expression is “the red flag.”—TRANS. “Drop it, Niura; it’s boring,” said Platonov with a wry face. “Can it!” (leave off) ordered Tamara severely, in the jargon of houses of prostitution. But it was impossible to stop Niura, who had gotten a running start. “But Ninka says: ‘I,’ she says, ‘won’t stay with him for anything, though you cut me all to pieces ... He,’ she says, ‘has made me all wet with his spit.’ Well, the old man complained to the porter, to be sure, and the porter starts in to beat up Ninka, to be sure. And Sergei Ivanich at this time was writing for me a letter home, to the province, and when he heard that Ninka was hollering...” “Zoe, shut her mouth!” said Platonov. “He just jumped up at once and ... app! ...” and Niura’s torrent instantly broke off, stopped up by Zoe’s palm. Everybody burst out laughing, only Boris Sobashnikov muttered under cover of the noise with a contemptuous look: “OH, CHEVALIER SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE!” He was already pretty far gone in drink, stood leaning against the wall, in a provoking pose, and was nervously chewing a cigarette. “Which Ninka is this?” asked Yarchenko with curiosity. “Is she here?”