in the evening, and
finished it in the morning. Then people began arriving with
petitions, and there came the reports, interviews, appointments,
dismissals, apportionment of rewards, pensions, grants, notes,
the workaday round, as Alexey Alexandrovitch called it, that
always took up so much time. Then there was private business of
his own, a visit from the doctor and the steward who managed his
property. The steward did not take up much time. He simply gave
Alexey Alexandrovitch the money he needed together with a brief
statement of the position of his affairs, which was not
altogether satisfactory, as it had happened that during that
year, owing to increased expenses, more had been paid out than
usual, and there was a deficit. But the doctor, a celebrated
Petersburg doctor, who was an intimate acquaintance of Alexey
Alexandrovitch, took up a great deal of time. Alexey
Alexandrovitch had not expected him that day, and was surprised
at his visit, and still more so when the doctor questioned him
very carefully about his health, listened to his breathing, and
tapped at his liver. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not know that his
friend Lidia Ivanovna, noticing that he was not as well as usual
that year, had begged the doctor to go and examine him. "Do this
for my sake," the Countess Lidia Ivanovna had said to him.

"I will do it for the sake of Russia, countess," replied the
doctor.

"A priceless man!" said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.

The doctor was extremely dissatisfied with Alexey Alexandrovitch.
He found the liver considerably enlarged, and the digestive
powers weakened, while the course of mineral waters had been
quite without effect. He prescribed more physical exercise as
far as possible, and as far as possible less mental strain, and
above all no worry--in other words, just what was as much out of
Alexey Alexandrovitch's power as abstaining from breathing. Then
he withdrew, leaving in Alexey Alexandrovitch an unpleasant sense
that something was wrong with him, and that there was no chance
of curing it.

As he was coming away, the doctor chanced to meet on the
staircase an acquaintance of his, Sludin, who was secretary of
Alexey Alexandrovitch's department. They had been comrades at
the university, and though they rarely met, they thought highly
of each other and were excellent friends, and so there was no one
to whom the doctor would have given his opinion of a patient so
freely as to Sludin.

"How