She would have been glad now if the porter had said “No,” but the latter, instead of answering ushered her into the hall, and helped her off with her coat.  The staircase impressed her as luxurious, and magnificent, but of all its splendours what caught her eye most was an immense looking-glass, in which she saw a ragged figure without a fashionable jacket, without a big hat, and without bronze shoes.  And it seemed strange to Vanda that, now that she was humbly dressed and looked like a laundress or sewing girl, she felt ashamed, and no trace of her usual boldness and sauciness remained, and in her own mind she no longer thought of herself as Vanda, but as the Nastasya Kanavkin she used to be in the old days. . . .

“Walk in, please,” said a maidservant, showing her into the consulting-room.  “The doctor will be here in a minute.  Sit down.”

Vanda sank into a soft arm-chair.

“I’ll ask him to lend it me,” she thought; “that will be quite proper, for, after all, I do know him.  If only that servant would go.  I don’t like to ask before her.  What does she want to stand there for?”

Five minutes later the door opened and Finkel came in.  He was a tall, dark Jew, with fat cheeks and bulging eyes.  His cheeks, his eyes, his chest, his body, all of him was so well fed, so loathsome and repellent!  At the “Renaissance” and the German Club he had usually been rather tipsy, and would spend his money freely on women, and be very long-suffering and patient with their pranks (when Vanda, for instance, poured the beer over his head, he simply smiled and shook his finger at her):  now he had a cross, sleepy expression and looked solemn and frigid like a police captain, and he kept chewing something.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, without looking at Vanda.

Vanda looked at the serious countenance of the maid and the smug figure of Finkel, who apparently did not recognize her, and she turned red.

“What can I do for you?” repeated the dentist a little irritably.

“I’ve got toothache,” murmured Vanda.

“Aha! . . .  Which is the tooth?  Where?”

Vanda remembered she had a hole in one of her teeth.

“At the bottom . . . on the right . . .” she said.

“Hm! . . .  Open your mouth.”

Finkel frowned and, holding his breath, began examining the tooth.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, digging into it with a steel instrument.

“Yes,” Vanda replied, untruthfully.

“Shall I remind him?” she was wondering.  “He would be sure to remember me.  But that servant!  Why will she stand there?”

Finkel suddenly snorted like a steam-engine right into her mouth, and said: 

“I don’t advise you to have it stopped.  That tooth will never be worth keeping anyhow.”

After probing the tooth a little more and soiling Vanda’s lips and gums with his tobacco-stained fingers, he held his breath again, and put something cold into her mouth.  Vanda suddenly felt a sharp pain, cried out, and clutched at Finkel’s hand.