"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.
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 S----v 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, restraining himself from being rude. "Is prostitution an evil or not?"
"My dear fellow, who disputes it?" the doctor said with an expression as though he had long ago solved all these questions for himself. "Who disputes it?"
"Perhaps all of you are right," said Vassiliev, rising and beginning to walk from corner to corner. "It may be. But to me all this seems amazing. They see a great achievement in my having passed through two faculties at the university; they praise me to the skies because I have written a work that will be thrown away and forgotten in three years' time, but became I can't speak of prostitutes as indifferently as I can about these chairs, they send me to doctors, call me a lunatic, and pity me."
For some reason Vassiliev suddenly began to feel an intolerable pity for himself, his friends, and everybody whom he had seen the day before yesterday, and for the doctor. He began to sob and fell into the chair.
The friends looked interrogatively at the doctor. He, looking as though he magnificently understood the tears and the despair, and knew himself a specialist in this line, approached Vassiliev and gave him some drops to drink, and then when Vassiliev grew calm undressed him and began to examine the sensitiveness of his skin, of the knee reflexes....
And Vassiliev felt better. When he was coming out of the doctor's he was already ashamed; the noise of the traffic did not seem irritating, and the heaviness beneath his heart became easier and easier as though it were thawing. In his hand were two prescriptions. One was for kali-bromatum, the other--morphia. He used to take both before.