handsome girl, with arched eyebrows, with grey, somewhat bulging
eyes, with the most typical, white, kind face of the Russian
prostitute--are playing at cards, playing at "sixty-six." Little
Manka's closest friend, Jennie, is lying behind their backs on the
bed, prone on her back, reading a tattered book, The Queen's
Necklace, the work of Monsieur Dumas, and smoking. In the entire
establishment she is the only lover of reading and reads
intoxicatingly and without discrimination. But, contrary to
expectation, the forced reading of novels of adventure has not at
all made her sentimental and has not vitiated her imagination.
Above all, she likes in novels a long intrigue, cunningly thought
out and deftly disentangled; magnificent duels, before which the
viscount unties the laces of his shoes to signify that he does not
intend to retreat even a step from his position,[Footnote:
Probably a sly dig at Gautier's Captain Fracasse.-Trans.] and
after which the marquis, having spitted the count through,
apologizes for having made an opening in his splendid new
waistcoat; purses, filled to the full with gold, carelessly strewn
to the left and right by the chief heroes; the love adventures and
witticisms of Henry IV--in a word, all this spiced heroism, in
gold and lace, of the past centuries of French history. In
everyday life, on the contrary, she is sober of mind, jeering,
practical and cynically malicious. In her relation to the other
girls of the establishment she occupies the same place that in
private educational institutions is accorded to the first strong
man, the man spending a second year in the same grade, the first
beauty in the class--tyrannizing and adored. She is a tall, thin
brunette, with beautiful hazel eyes, a small proud mouth, a little
moustache on the upper lip and with a swarthy, unhealthy pink on
her cheeks.