That morning was a very full one for Alexey Alexandrovitch.  The evening before, Countess Lidia Ivanovna had sent him a pamphlet by a celebrated traveler in China, who was staying in Petersburg, and with it she enclosed a note begging him to see the traveler himself, as he was an extremely interesting person from various points of view, and likely to be useful.  Alexey Alexandrovitch had not had time to read the pamphlet through in the evening, and finished it in the morning.  Then people began arriving with petitions, and there came the reports, interviews, appointments, dismissals, apportionment of rewards, pensions, grants, notes, the workaday round, as Alexey Alexandrovitch called it, that always took up so much time.  Then there was private business of his own, a visit from the doctor and the steward who managed his property.  The steward did not take up much time.  He simply gave Alexey Alexandrovitch the money he needed together with a brief statement of the position of his affairs, which was not altogether satisfactory, as it had happened that during that year, owing to increased expenses, more had been paid out than usual, and there was a deficit.  But the doctor, a celebrated Petersburg doctor, who was an intimate acquaintance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, took up a great deal of time.  Alexey Alexandrovitch had not expected him that day, and was surprised at his visit, and still more so when the doctor questioned him very carefully about his health, listened to his breathing, and tapped at his liver.  Alexey Alexandrovitch did not know that his friend Lidia Ivanovna, noticing that he was not as well as usual that year, had begged the doctor to go and examine him.  “Do this for my sake,” the Countess Lidia Ivanovna had said to him.

“I will do it for the sake of Russia, countess,” replied the doctor.

“A priceless man!” said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.

The doctor was extremely dissatisfied with Alexey Alexandrovitch.  He found the liver considerably enlarged, and the digestive powers weakened, while the course of mineral waters had been quite without effect.  He prescribed more physical exercise as far as possible, and as far as possible less mental strain, and above all no worry—­in other words, just what was as much out of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s power as abstaining from breathing.  Then he withdrew, leaving in Alexey Alexandrovitch an unpleasant sense that something was wrong with him, and that there was no chance of curing it.

As he was coming away, the doctor chanced to meet on the staircase an acquaintance of his, Sludin, who was secretary of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s department.  They had been comrades at the university, and though they rarely met, they thought highly of each other and were excellent friends, and so there was no one to whom the doctor would have given his opinion of a patient so freely as to Sludin.

“How glad I am you’ve been seeing him!” said Sludin.  “He’s not well, and I fancy....  Well, what do you think of him?”