by doctors of their patients can be left
unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail
Sergeyitch, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though
if Vassilyev failed to answer one question all would be lost. As he
received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip
of paper. On learning that Vassilyev had taken his degree in natural
science, and was now studying law, the doctor pondered.

"He wrote a first-rate piece of original work last year,..." said the
medical student.

"I beg your pardon, but don't interrupt me; you prevent me from
concentrating," said the doctor, and he smiled on one side of his
face. "Though, of course, that does enter into the diagnosis. Intense
intellectual work, nervous exhaustion.... Yes, yes.... And do you
drink vodka?" he said, addressing Vassilyev.

"Very rarely."

Another twenty minutes passed. The medical student began telling the
doctor in a low voice his opinion as to the immediate cause of
the attack, and described how the day before yesterday the artist,
Vassilyev, and he had visited S. Street.

The indifferent, reserved, and frigid tone in which his friends and the
doctor spoke of the women and that miserable street struck Vassilyev as
strange in the extreme....

"Doctor, tell me one thing only," he said, controlling himself so as not
to speak rudely. "Is prostitution an evil or not?"

"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
ai