disgusting. She suddenly felt poignantly sorry for Dymov, for his
boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for the desolate
little bed in which he had not slept for so long; and she remembered
his habitual, gentle, submissive smile. She wept bitterly, and wrote an
imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o'clock in the night.

VIII

When towards eight o'clock in the morning Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy
from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed, came out of her bedroom,
looking unattractive and with a guilty expression on her face, a
gentleman with a black beard, apparently the doctor, passed by her into
the entry. There was a smell of drugs. Korostelev was standing near the
study door, twisting his left moustache with his right hand.

"Excuse me, I can't let you go in," he said surlily to Olga Ivanovna;
"it's catching. Besides, it's no use, really; he is delirious, anyway."

"Has he really got diphtheria?" Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.

"People who wantonly risk infection ought to be hauled up and punished
for it," muttered Korostelev, not answering Olga Ivanovna's question.
"Do you know why he caught it? On Tuesday he was sucking up the mucus
through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was
stupid.... Just from folly...."

"Is it dangerous, very?" asked Olga Ivanovna.

"Yes; they say it is the malignant form. We ought to send for Shrek
really."

A little red-haired man with a long nose and a Jewish accent arrived;
then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual, who looked like a head deacon;
then a stout young man with a red face and spectacles. These were
doctors who came to watch by turns beside their colleague. Korostelev
did not go home when his turn was over, but remained and wandered about
the rooms like an uneasy spirit. The maid kept getting tea for the
various doctors, and was constantly running to the chemist, and there
was no one to do the rooms. There was a dismal stillness in the flat.

Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was punishing her
for having deceived her husband. That silent, unrepining, uncomprehended
creature, robbed by his mildness of all personality and will, weak from
excessive kindness, had been suffering in obscurity somewhere on
his sofa, and had not complained. And if he were to complain even
in delirium, the doctors watching by his bedside would learn that
diphtheria was not the only cause of his sufferings. They would ask
Koro