All the blood suddenly rushed to my brain, my eyes flashed fire, I leaped up and, clutching at my head and stamping my feet, shouted in a voice unlike my own: 

“Let me alone! let me alone! let me alone!”

Probably my face was terrible, my voice was strange, for my wife suddenly turned pale and began shrieking aloud in a despairing voice that was utterly unlike her own.  Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor, came running in at our shouts....

“Let me alone!” I cried; “let me alone!  Go away!”

My legs turned numb as though they had ceased to exist; I felt myself falling into someone’s arms; for a little while I still heard weeping, then sank into a swoon which lasted two or three hours.

Now about Katya; she comes to see me every day towards evening, and of course neither the neighbours nor our acquaintances can avoid noticing it.  She comes in for a minute and carries me off for a drive with her.  She has her own horse and a new chaise bought this summer.  Altogether she lives in an expensive style; she has taken a big detached villa with a large garden, and has taken all her town retinue with her—­two maids, a coachman...  I often ask her: 

“Katya, what will you live on when you have spent your father’s money?”

“Then we shall see,” she answers.

“That money, my dear, deserves to be treated more seriously.  It was earned by a good man, by honest labour.”

“You have told me that already.  I know it.”

At first we drive through the open country, then through the pine-wood which is visible from my window.  Nature seems to me as beautiful as it always has been, though some evil spirit whispers to me that these pines and fir trees, birds, and white clouds on the sky, will not notice my absence when in three or four months I am dead.  Katya loves driving, and she is pleased that it is fine weather and that I am sitting beside her.  She is in good spirits and does not say harsh things.

“You are a very good man, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she says.  “You are a rare specimen, and there isn’t an actor who would understand how to play you.  Me or Mihail Fyodorovitch, for instance, any poor actor could do, but not you.  And I envy you, I envy you horribly!  Do you know what I stand for?  What?”

She ponders for a minute, and then asks me: 

“Nikolay Stepanovitch, I am a negative phenomenon!  Yes?”

“Yes,” I answer.

“H’m! what am I to do?”

What answer was I to make her?  It is easy to say “work,” or “give your possessions to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and because it is so easy to say that, I don’t know what to answer.

My colleagues when they teach therapeutics advise “the individual study of each separate case.”  One has but to obey this advice to gain the conviction that the methods recommended in the textbooks as the best and as providing a safe basis for treatment turn out to be quite unsuitable in individual cases.  It is just the same in moral ailments.