“Well, go on, Tamara, go on,” said Jennka tenderly, getting up.  “I’ll run into my room for just a minute—­I haven’t changed my dress yet, although, to tell the truth, this also is all one.  When they’ll be calling out for me, and I don’t come in time, call out, run in after me.”

And, going out of Tamara’s room, she embraced her by the shoulder, as though by chance, and stroked it tenderly.

Doctor Klimenko—­the official city doctor—­was preparing in the parlor everything indispensable for an nspection—­vaseline, a solution of sublimate, and other things—­and was placing them on a separate little table.  Here also were arranged for him the white blanks of the girls, replacing their passports, as well as a general alphabetical list.  The girls, dressed only in their chemises, stockings, and slippers, were standing and sitting at a distance.  Nearer the table was standing the proprietress herself—­ Anna Markovna—­while a little behind her were Emma Edwardovna and Zociya.

The doctor—­aged, disheartened, slovenly; a man indifferent to everything—­put the pince-nez crookedly upon his nose, looked at the list, and called out: 

“Alexandra Budzinskaya! ...”

The frowning, little, pug-nosed Nina stepped out.  Preserving on her face an angry expression, and breathing heavily from shame, from the consciousness of her own awkwardness, and from the exertions, she clumsily climbed up on the table.  The doctor, squinting through his pince-nez and dropping it every minute, carried out the inspection.

“Go ahead! ...  You’re sound.”

And on the reverse side of the blank he marked off:  “Twenty-eighth of August.  Sound” and put down a curly-cue.  And when he had not even finished writing called out: 

“Voshchenkova, Irene! ...”

Now it was the turn of Liubka.  She, during the past month and a half of comparative freedom, had had time to grow unaccustomed to the inspections of every week; and when the doctor turned up the chemise over her breast, she suddenly turned as red as only very bashful women can—­even with her back and breast.

After her was the turn of Zoe; then of Little White Manka; after that of Tamara and Niurka—­the last, the doctor found, had gonorrhoea, and ordered her to be sent off to a hospital.

The doctor carried out the inspection with amazing rapidity.  It was now nearly twenty years that every week, on Saturdays, he had to inspect in such a manner several hundred girls; and he had worked out that habitual technical dexterity and rapidity, a calm carelessness of movements, which is; frequently to be found in circus artists, in card sharpers, in furniture movers and packers, and in other professionals.  And he carried out his manipulations with the same calmness with which a drover or a veterinary inspects several hundred head of cattle in a day.

Did he ever think that before him were living people; or that he appeared as the last and most important link of that fearful chain which is called legalized prostitution?