She counted exclusively in ones, twos, threes and
fives. Thus, for example, twelve to her was two times two threes;
nineteen--three fives and two twos; and, it must be said, that
through her system she with the rapidity of a counting board
operated almost up to a hundred. To go further she dared not; and
besides she had no practical need of this. In vain did Lichonin
try to transfer her to a digital system. Nothing came of this,
save that he flew into a rage, yelled at Liubka; while she would
look at him in silence, with astonished, widely open and guilty
eyes, the lashes of which stuck into long black arrows from tears.
Also, through a capricious turn of her mind, she began to master
addition and multiplication with comparative ease, but subtraction
and division were for her an impenetrable wall. But then, she
could, with amazing speed and wit, solve all possible jocose oral
head-breaking riddles, and even remembered very many of them
herself from the thousand year old usage of the village. Toward
geography she was perfectly dull. True, she could orientate
herself as to the four cardinal points on the street, in the
garden, and in the room; hundreds of times better than Lichonin--
the ancient peasant instinct in her asserted itself--but she
stubbornly denied the sphericity of the earth and did not
recognize the horizon; and when she was told that the terrestrial
globe moves in space, she only snorted from laughter.
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