“Yes, a likely idea!” said Ivan Dmitritch, sitting up and looking at the doctor with irony and uneasiness.  His eyes were red.  “You can go and spy and probe somewhere else, it’s no use your doing it here.  I knew yesterday what you had come for.”

“A strange fancy,” laughed the doctor.  “So you suppose me to be a spy?”

“Yes, I do. . . .  A spy or a doctor who has been charged to test me—­it’s all the same ——­”

“Oh excuse me, what a queer fellow you are really!”

The doctor sat down on the stool near the bed and shook his head reproachfully.

“But let us suppose you are right,” he said, “let us suppose that I am treacherously trying to trap you into saying something so as to betray you to the police.  You would be arrested and then tried.  But would you be any worse off being tried and in prison than you are here?  If you are banished to a settlement, or even sent to penal servitude, would it be worse than being shut up in this ward?  I imagine it would be no worse. . . .  What, then, are you afraid of?”

These words evidently had an effect on Ivan Dmitritch.  He sat down quietly.

It was between four and five in the afternoon—­the time when Andrey Yefimitch usually walked up and down his rooms, and Daryushka asked whether it was not time for his beer.  It was a still, bright day.

“I came out for a walk after dinner, and here I have come, as you see,” said the doctor.  “It is quite spring.”

“What month is it?  March?” asked Ivan Dmitritch.

“Yes, the end of March.”

“Is it very muddy?”

“No, not very.  There are already paths in the garden.”

“It would be nice now to drive in an open carriage somewhere into the country,” said Ivan Dmitritch, rubbing his red eyes as though he were just awake, “then to come home to a warm, snug study, and . . . and to have a decent doctor to cure one’s headache. . . .  It’s so long since I have lived like a human being.  It’s disgusting here!  Insufferably disgusting!”

After his excitement of the previous day he was exhausted and listless, and spoke unwillingly.  His fingers twitched, and from his face it could be seen that he had a splitting headache.

“There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,” said Andrey Yefimitch.  “A man’s peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“The ordinary man looks for good and evil in external things—­ that is, in carriages, in studies—­but a thinking man looks for it in himself.”

“You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it’s warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to the climate.  With whom was it I was talking of Diogenes?  Was it with you?”

“Yes, with me yesterday.”

“Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it’s hot there without.  You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives.  But bring him to Russia to live:  he’d be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December.  He’d be doubled up with the cold.”