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“Mihail Sergeyitch has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long time,” the medical student said on the way. “He is a very nice man and thoroughly good at his work. He took his degree in 1882, and he has an immense practice already. He treats students as though he were one himself.”

“Make haste, make haste! . . .” Vassilyev urged.

Mihail Sergeyitch, a stout, fair-haired doctor, received the friends with politeness and frigid dignity, and smiled only on one side of his face.

“Rybnikov and Mayer have spoken to me of your illness already,” he said. “Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, I beg. . . .”

He made Vassilyev sit down in a big armchair near the table, and moved a box of cigarettes towards him.

“Now then!” he began, stroking his knees. “Let us get to work. . . . How old are you?”

He asked questions and the medical student answered them. He asked whether Vassilyev’s father had suffered from certain special diseases, whether he drank to excess, whether he were remarkable for cruelty or any peculiarities. He made similar inquiries about his grandfather, mother, sisters, and brothers. On learning that his mother had a beautiful voice and sometimes acted on the stage, he grew more animated at once, and asked:

“Excuse me, but don’t you remember, perhaps, your mother had a passion for the stage?”

Twenty minutes passed. Vassilyev was annoyed by the way the docto r kept stroking his knees and talking of the same thing.

“So far as I understand your questions, doctor,” he said, “you want to know whether my illness is hereditary or not. It is not.”

The doctor proceeded to ask Vassilyev whether he had had any secret vices as a boy, or had received injuries to his head; whether he had had any aberrations, any peculiarities, or exceptional propensities. Half the questions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail Sergeyitch, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though if Vassilyev failed to answer one question all would be lost. As he received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip of paper. On learning that Vassilyev had taken his degree in natural science, and was now studying law, the doctor pondered.

“He wrote a first-rate piece of original work last year, . . .” said the medical student.

“I beg your pardon, but don’t interrupt me; you prevent me from concentrating,” said the doctor, and he smiled on one side of his face. “Though, of course, that does enter into the diagnosis. Intense intellectual work, nervous exhaustion. . . . Yes, yes. . . . And do you drink vodka?” he said, addressing Vassilyev.

“Very rarely.”

Another twenty minutes passed. The medical student began telling the doctor in a low voice his opinion as to the immediate cause of the attack, and described how the day before yesterday the artist, Vassilyev, and he had visited S. Street.

The indifferent, reserved, and frigid tone in which his friends and the doctor spoke of the women and that miserable street struck Vassilyev as strange in the extreme. . . .

“Doctor, tell me one thing only,” he said, controlling himself so as not to speak rudely. “Is prostitution an evil or not?”

“My dear fellow, who disputes it?” said the doctor, with an expression that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long ago. “Who disputes it?”

“You are a mental doctor, aren’t you?” Vassilyev asked curtly.

“Yes, a mental doctor.”

“Perhaps all of you are right!” said Vassilyev, getting up and beginning to walk from one end of the room to the other. “Perhaps! But it all seems marvelous to me! That I should have taken my degree in two faculties you look upon as a great achievement; because I have written a work which in three years will be thrown aside and forgotten, I am praised up to the skies; but because I cannot speak of fallen women as unconcernedly as of these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am called mad, I am pitied!”