“How do you feel after yesterday?”

“Very well indeed,” said Laevsky, flushing.  “It really was nothing much. . . .”

“Until yesterday I thought it was only ladies who had hysterics, and so at first I thought you had St. Vitus’s dance.”

Laevsky smiled ingratiatingly, and thought: 

“How indelicate on his part!  He knows quite well how unpleasant it is for me. . . .”

“Yes, it was a ridiculous performance,” he said, still smiling.  “I’ve been laughing over it the whole morning.  What’s so curious in an attack of hysterics is that you know it is absurd, and are laughing at it in your heart, and at the same time you sob.  In our neurotic age we are the slaves of our nerves; they are our masters and do as they like with us.  Civilisation has done us a bad turn in that way. . . .”

As Laevsky talked, he felt it disagreeable that Von Koren listened to him gravely, and looked at him steadily and attentively as though studying him; and he was vexed with himself that in spite of his dislike of Von Koren, he could not banish the ingratiating smile from his face.

“I must admit, though,” he added, “that there were immediate causes for the attack, and quite sufficient ones too.  My health has been terribly shaky of late.  To which one must add boredom, constantly being hard up . . . the absence of people and general interests . . . .  My position is worse than a governor’s.”

“Yes, your position is a hopeless one,” answered Von Koren.

These calm, cold words, implying something between a jeer and an uninvited prediction, offended Laevsky.  He recalled the zoologist’s eyes the evening before, full of mockery and disgust.  He was silent for a space and then asked, no longer smiling: 

“How do you know anything of my position?”

“You were only just speaking of it yourself.  Besides, your friends take such a warm interest in you, that I am hearing about you all day long.”

“What friends?  Samoylenko, I suppose?”

“Yes, he too.”

“I would ask Alexandr Daviditch and my friends in general not to trouble so much about me.”

“Here is Samoylenko; you had better ask him not to trouble so much about you.”

“I don’t understand your tone,” Laevsky muttered, suddenly feeling as though he had only just realised that the zoologist hated and despised him, and was jeering at him, and was his bitterest and most inveterate enemy.

“Keep that tone for some one else,” he said softly, unable to speak aloud for the hatred with which his chest and throat were choking, as they had been the night before with laughter.

Samoylenko came in in his shirt-sleeves, crimson and perspiring from the stifling kitchen.

“Ah, you here?” he said.  “Good-morning, my dear boy.  Have you had dinner?  Don’t stand on ceremony.  Have you had dinner?”

“Alexandr Daviditch,” said Laevsky, standing up, “though I did appeal to you to help me in a private matter, it did not follow that I released you from the obligation of discretion and respect for other people’s private affairs.”