t leads one straight into the dirt. You've let yourself get so slack
that I don't know how it is you are still a good, even a devoted doctor.
You--a doctor--sleep on a feather bed and get up at night to your
patients! In another three or four years you won't get up for your
patients... But hang it all, that's not the point!... You are going
to spend to-night in the landlady's flat here. (Hard work I've had to
persuade her!) And I'll be in the kitchen. So here's a chance for you to
get to know her better.... It's not as you think! There's not a trace of
anything of the sort, brother...!"

"But I don't think!"

"Here you have modesty, brother, silence, bashfulness, a savage
virtue... and yet she's sighing and melting like wax, simply melting!
Save me from her, by all that's unholy! She's most prepossessing... I'll
repay you, I'll do anything...."

Zossimov laughed more violently than ever.

"Well, you are smitten! But what am I to do with her?"

"It won't be much trouble, I assure you. Talk any rot you like to her,
as long as you sit by her and talk. You're a doctor, too; try curing
her of something. I swear you won't regret it. She has a piano, and you
know, I strum a little. I have a song there, a genuine Russian one: 'I
shed hot tears.' She likes the genuine article--and well, it all
began with that song; Now you're a regular performer, a _maitre_, a
Rubinstein.... I assure you, you won't regret it!"

"But have you made her some promise? Something signed? A promise of
marriage, perhaps?"

"Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of the kind! Besides she is not
that sort at all.... Tchebarov tried that...."

"Well then, drop her!"

"But I can't drop her like that!"

"Why can't you?"

"Well, I can't, that's all about it! There's an element of attraction
here, brother."

"Then why have you fascinated her?"

"I haven't fascinated her; perhaps I was fascinated myself in my folly.
But she won't care a straw whether it's you or I, so long as somebody
sits beside her, sighing.... I can't explain the position, brother...
look here, you are good at mathematics, and working at it now... begin
teaching her the integral calculus; upon my soul, I'm not joking, I'm
in earnest, it'll be just the same to her. She will gaze at you and sigh
for a whole year together. I talked to her once for two days at a time
about the Prussian House of Lords (for one must talk of something)--she
just sighed and perspired! And you mustn't