He suffers madly,
Pants and coat gladly
All for a woman he will give."
"How do they call you, ducky dear?"
"George," answered Petrov in a hoarse, cadet's bass.
"Jorjik Jorochka! Ah, how very nice!"
She suddenly drew near to his ear and whispered with a cunning
face:
"Jorochka, come to me."
Petrov was abashed and forlornly let out in a bass:
"I don't know ... It all depends on what the comrade says, now
..."
Verka burst into loud laughter:
"There's a case for you! Say, what an infant it is! Such as you,
Jorochka, in a little village would long since have been married;
but he says: 'It all depends on the comrade!' You ought to ask a
nurse or a wet nurse yet! Tamara, my angel, just imagine: I'm
calling him to go sleeping, but he says: 'It all depends on the
comrade.' What about you, mister friend, are you his bringer up?"
"Don't be pestering, you devil!" clumsily, altogether like a cadet
before a quarrel, grumbled out Petrov in a bass.
The lanky, ricketty Roly-Poly, grown still grayer, walked up to
the cadets, and, inclining his long, narrow head to one side, and
having made a touching grimace, began to patter:
"Messieurs cadets, highly educated young people; the flower, so to
speak, of the intelligentzia; future masters of ordnance, will you
not lend to a little old man, an aborigine of these herbiferous
regions, one good old cigarette? I be poor.
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