Page:The Bet and Other Stories.djvu/150

138 the head, any love passions, eccentricities, or exceptional infatuations. To half the questions habitually asked by careful doctors you may return no answer without any injury to your health; but Mikhail Sergueyich, the medico and the painter looked as though, if Vassiliev failed to answer even one single question, everything would be ruined. For some reason the doctor wrote down the answers he received on a scrap of paper. Discovering that Vassiliev had already passed through the faculty of natural science and was now in the Law faculty, the doctor began to be pensive. . ..

"He wrote a brilliant thesis last year . . ." said the medico.

"Excuse me. You mustn't interrupt me; you prevent me from concentrating," the doctor said, smiling with one cheek. "Yes, certainly that is important for the anamnesis. . . . Yes, yes. . . . And do you drink vodka?" he turned to Vassiliev.

"Very rarely."

Another twenty minutes passed. The medico began sotto voce to give his opinion of the immediate causes of the fit and told how he, the painter and Vassiliev went to Sv Street the day before yesterday.

The indifferent, reserved, cold tone in which his friends and the doctor were speaking of the women and the miserable street seemed to him in the highest degree strange. . ..

"Doctor, tell me this one thing," he said,