The princess sat amazed, aghast, offended, not knowing what to say or how to behave.  She had never before been spoken to in such a tone.  The doctor’s unpleasant, angry voice and his clumsy, faltering phrases made a harsh clattering noise in her ears and her head.  Then she began to feel as though the gesticulating doctor was hitting her on the head with his hat.

“It’s not true!” she articulated softly, in an imploring voice.  “I’ve done a great deal of good for other people; you know it yourself!”

“Nonsense!” cried the doctor.  “Can you possibly go on thinking of your philanthropic work as something genuine and useful, and not a mere mummery?  It was a farce from beginning to end; it was playing at loving your neighbour, the most open farce which even children and stupid peasant women saw through!  Take for instance your—­ what was it called?—­house for homeless old women without relations, of which you made me something like a head doctor, and of which you were the patroness.  Mercy on us!  What a charming institution it was!  A house was built with parquet floors and a weathercock on the roof; a dozen old women were collected from the villages and made to sleep under blankets and sheets of Dutch linen, and given toffee to eat.”

The doctor gave a malignant chuckle into his hat, and went on speaking rapidly and stammering: 

“It was a farce!  The attendants kept the sheets and the blankets under lock and key, for fear the old women should soil them—­’Let the old devil’s pepper-pots sleep on the floor.’  The old women did not dare to sit down on the beds, to put on their jackets, to walk over the polished floors.  Everything was kept for show and hidden away from the old women as though they were thieves, and the old women were clothed and fed on the sly by other people’s charity, and prayed to God night and day to be released from their prison and from the canting exhortations of the sleek rascals to whose care you committed them.  And what did the managers do?  It was simply charming!  About twice a week there would be thirty-five thousand messages to say that the princess—­that is, you—­were coming to the home next day.  That meant that next day I had to abandon my patients, dress up and be on parade.  Very good; I arrive.  The old women, in everything clean and new, are already drawn up in a row, waiting.  Near them struts the old garrison rat—­the superintendent with his mawkish, sneaking smile.  The old women yawn and exchange glances, but are afraid to complain.  We wait.  The junior steward gallops up.  Half an hour later the senior steward; then the superintendent of the accounts’ office, then another, and then another of them . . . they keep arriving endlessly.  They all have mysterious, solemn faces.  We wait and wait, shift from one leg to another, look at the clock—­all this in monumental silence because we all hate each other like poison.  One hour passes, then a second, and then at last the carriage is seen in the distance, and . . . and . . .”