“My dear fellow, who disputes it?” said the doctor, with an expression that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long ago.  “Who disputes it?”

“You are a mental doctor, aren’t you?” Vassilyev asked curtly.

“Yes, a mental doctor.”

“Perhaps all of you are right!” said Vassilyev, getting up and beginning to walk from one end of the room to the other.  “Perhaps!  But it all seems marvelous to me!  That I should have taken my degree in two faculties you look upon as a great achievement; because I have written a work which in three years will be thrown aside and forgotten, I am praised up to the skies; but because I cannot speak of fallen women as unconcernedly as of these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am called mad, I am pitied!”

Vassilyev for some reason felt all at once unutterably sorry for himself, and his companions, and all the people he had seen two days before, and for the doctor; he burst into tears and sank into a chair.

His friends looked inquiringly at the doctor.  The latter, with the air of completely comprehending the tears and the despair, of feeling himself a specialist in that line, went up to Vassilyev and, without a word, gave him some medicine to drink; and then, when he was calmer, undressed him and began to investigate the degree of sensibility of the skin, the reflex action of the knees, and so on.

And Vassilyev felt easier.  When he came out from the doctor’s he was beginning to feel ashamed; the rattle of the carriages no longer irritated him, and the load at his heart grew lighter and lighter as though it were melting away.  He had two prescriptions in his hand:  one was for bromide, one was for morphia....  He had taken all these remedies before.

In the street he stood still and, saying good-by to his friends, dragged himself languidly to the University.

MISERY

“To whom shall I tell my grief?”

The twilight of evening.  Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses’ backs, shoulders, caps.  Iona Potapov, the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost.  He sits on the box without stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent.  If a regular snowdrift fell on him it seems as though even then he would not think it necessary to shake it off....  His little mare is white and motionless too.  Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread horse.  She is probably lost in thought.  Anyone who has been torn away from the plough, from the familiar gray landscapes, and cast into this slough, full of monstrous lights, of unceasing uproar and hurrying people, is bound to think.

It is a long time since Iona and his nag have budged.  They came out of the yard before dinnertime and not a single fare yet.  But now the shades of evening are falling on the town.  The pale light of the street lamps changes to a vivid color, and the bustle of the street grows noisier.