«Money doesn’t make happiness,» Lana said with irritation in her voice. «When dad passes away I’ll give all his money to some charity organization.»
«I’m sorry, Miss…?» Vera looked questionably at Lana.
«Limpson.»
«I’m sorry, Miss Limpson, but you’re too young for such discourses. Your father spent all his life to make this money, and you want to waste it? It would be a stupid and dishonest act.»
«Oleg is right,» Lana thought, feeling angry. «She’s just a miser.»
«As I know,» she addressed Vera. «Your husband is making good money in Russia. You have to love him very much, don’t you?»
«I think it’s too personal to discuss.» Vera looked at Lana with surprise, but she thought the girl needed some advice, and she relented. «Life is not as easy as we wish,» she tried to explain.
It was the same phrase that Oleg had said to Lana when she had asked him why he did not divorce Vera if they did not love each other. «Life is not so easy.» He sighed, and a tender compassion for this Russian man rising in her heart.
«Once Oleg came home with his coat so dirty that I was amazed,» Vera continued. «I’m sure he got plastered and fell into some puddle. Like a pig. And I have to love such a man?»
Lana recalled the episode with the wolf-skin coat, and her feelings for Oleg became much stronger. But this phrase made her worry.
«Does he drink a lot?» she asked, trying not to show her concern.
«Honestly, I’ve never seen Oleg drunk,» Vera confessed, sighing. «But that evening he was so strange, I have no other explanation.»
«Oleg loves me!» thought Lana, melting with that feeling. «He loves me! He surely loves me! Stupid woman, how could she not appreciate him?»
Lana took the pictures and gave the money to Vera.
«If you don’t love him,» asked Lana carefully, «why don’t you rent another apartment?»
«It’s okay with me,» Vera answered calmly. «But to rent a separate apartment would be a pointless waste of money.»
Lana shuddered and left without saying goodbye.
Chapter 7: In Love with A Married Person
Lana did not have school today, so she drove home. Not to the house that she rented on campus, but to the Limpsons’ mansion. It was a rare day that her father was home, and she planned to show him those pictures and ask him about an idea that had come to her.
At home she told a servant to call her father, and, while waiting for him, she placed the pictures in a special hall, where she usually kept her new things before she decided which place was best for them.
Lana heard her father come in, and, smiling, she turned toward him. Stubby, but imposing and dignified, he was in great shape for a man in his mid-fifties, and Lana looked at her father with delight and pride.