your constitution makes it bad for you to drink? Your lungs are already very much injured by it. Let me examine you.' Well, Viéra Pavlovna, you won't believe me, but I assure you that I felt ashamed,—and yet what was my life? and how shamefully I had been behaving just a few minutes before!—and he noticed it. 'Don't be disturbed,' he says; 'I only want to examine your lungs.' He was then only in the second class, but he knew a great deal about medicine; he was away ahead in science.
"He examined my chest. 'No,' says he, 'you must not drink at all; you have very weak lungs.' 'How can we help drinking?' I asked. 'We cannot get along without it.' And it is really impossible, Viéra Pavlovna. 'Then you must give up the life that you are leading.' 'Why should I give it up? It's such a gay life.' 'No,' says he, 'there's very little gayety in it. Nu!' says he, 'I am very busy now, and you had better leave me.' And I left him, feeling very angry because I had wasted my evening; and I felt very much offended because he was such a passionless fellow, because we have our ambition in such matters, you know.
"And then in a month it occurred to me to go to the same place again. 'Come on,' says I, 'I'll go and see that stick again; I'll see if I can't wake him up.' This was just before dinner. I had gone to bed the previous night, and I had not been drinking; he was sitting with a book. 'Hullo, old stick,' says I. 'How do you do? What do you want?' Then I began again to do ridiculous things. 'I shall put you out,' he says; 'stop, I told you that I did not like it. You are not drunk now, and you can understand; and you had better heed what I say; your face shows that you are sicker than you were before; you must give up wine; just fix your dress and we will have a little talk.' Well, the fact was that my chest had already begun to pain me; he examined me again; he said that my lungs were in a worse state than before; he had a great deal to say; yes, and my chest did pain me, and so I began to get sentimental, and I burst into tears. I did not want to die, and he was all the time threatening me with consumption. And I say, 'How can I give up my mode of life? My khozyáïka will not let me go. I owe her seventeen silver rubles.' We were always kept in
