Vjera, being interpreted from the Russian, means "Faith." There is an odd
and pathetic irony in the name borne by the sickly girl. Faith--faith in
what? In shell-making? In Christian Fischelowitz? In Johann Schmidt, the
Cossack tobacco-cutter, whose real name is lost in the gloom of many dim
wanderings? In life? In death? Who knows? In God, at least, poor
child--and in her wretched existence there is little else left for her to
believe in. If you ask her whether she believes in the Count, she will
turn away rather hastily, but in that case the wish to believe is there.

Beside Vjera sits another girl, less pale perhaps, but more insignificant
in feature, and similarly occupied, with this slight difference that the
little cylinders she makes are straw-coloured when Vjera is making white
ones, and white when her companion is using straw-coloured paper. On the
opposite side of the room, also before small black tables, sit two men, to
wit, Victor Ivanowitch Dumnoff and the Count. It is their business to
shape the tobacco and to insert it into the shells, a process performed by
rolling the cut leaf into a cylinder in a tongue-shaped piece of
parchment, which, when ready, has the form of a pencil, and is slipped
into the shell. The parchment is then withdrawn, and the tobacco remains
behind in its place; the little bunch of threads which protrudes at each
end is cut off with sharp scissors and the cigarette is finished.

The Count, on the afternoon of the day on which this story opens, was
sitting before his little black table in his usual attitude, his head
stooping slightly forward, his elbows supported on each side of him, his
long fingers moving quickly and skilfully, his greyish blue eyes fixed
intently on his work. At five o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, the
sixth of May, in the present year of grace one thousand eight hundred and
ninety, the Count was rapidly approaching the two-thousandth cigarette of
that day's work. Two thousand in a day was his limit; and though he