“What nonsense! What about the University?” “And the University, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in it all. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years, and where are your pupils? Have you many famous scholars? Count them up. But to increase the number of doctors who exploit the general ignorance and make hundreds of thousands,--there’s no need to be a good and gifted man. You aren’t wanted.” “My God, how bitter you are!” I get terrified. “How bitter you are. Be quiet, or I’ll go away. I can’t reply to the bitter things you say.” The maid enters and calls us to tea. Thank God, our conversation changes round the samovar. I have made my moan, and now I want to indulge another senile weakness--reminiscences. I tell Katy about my past, to my great surprise with details that I never suspected I had kept safe in my memory. And she listens to me with emotion, with pride, holding her breath. I like particularly to tell how I once was a student at a seminary and how I dreamed of entering the University. “I used to walk in the seminary garden,” I tell her, “and the wind would bring the sound of a song and the thrumming of an accordion from a distant tavern, or a _troika_ with bells would pass quickly by the seminary fence. That would be quite enough to fill not only my breast with a sense of happiness, but my stomach, legs, and hands. As I heard the sound of the accordion or the bells fading away, I would see myself a doctor and paint pictures, one more glorious than another. And, you see, my dreams came true. There were more things I dared to dream of. I have been a favourite professor thirty years, I have had excellent friends and an honourable reputation. I loved and married when I was passionately in love. I had children. Altogether, when I look back the whole of my life seems like a nice, clever composition. The only thing I have to do now is not to spoil the _finale._ For this, I must die like a man. If death is really a danger then I must meet it as becomes a teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of a Christian State. But I am spoiling the _finale._ I am drowning, and I run to you and beg for help, and you say: ‘Drown. It’s your duty.’” At this point a ring at the bell sounds in the hall. Katy and I both recognise it and say: “That must be Mikhail Fiodorovich.”