make all this nonsense out of a joke! Here’s mamma, very apropos, perhaps. Mamma, how slow you always are, how can you be so long! And here’s Yulia with the ice!”
“Oh, Lise, don’t scream, above all things don’t scream. That scream drives me … How can I help it when you put the lint in another place? I’ve been hunting and hunting—I do believe you did it on purpose.”
“But I couldn’t tell that he would come with a bad finger, or else perhaps I might have done it on purpose. My darling mamma, you begin to say really witty things.”
“Never mind my being witty, but I must say you show nice feeling for Alexey Fyodorovitch’s sufferings! Oh, my dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, what’s killing me is no one thing in particular, not Herzenstube, but everything together, that’s what is too much for me.”