On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the drawing-room, without taking off her things, to begin the letter. Ryabovsky had told her she was not an artist, and to pay him out she wrote to him now that he painted the same thing every year, and said exactly the same thing every day; that he was at a standstill, and that nothing more would come of him than had come already. She wanted to write, too, that he owed a great deal to her good influence, and that if he was going wrong it was only because her influence was paralysed by various dubious persons like the one who had been hiding behind the picture that day. “Little mother!” Dymov called from the study, without opening the door. “What is it?” “Don’t come in to me, but only come to the door--that’s right.... The day before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria at the hospital, and now... I am ill. Make haste and send for Korostelev.” Olga Ivanovna always called her husband by his surname, as she did all the men of her acquaintance; she disliked his Christian name, Osip, because it reminded her of the Osip in Gogol and the silly pun on his name. But now she cried: “Osip, it cannot be!” “Send for him; I feel ill,” Dymov said behind the door, and she could hear him go back to the sofa and lie down. “Send!” she heard his voice faintly. “Good Heavens!” thought Olga Ivanovna, turning chill with horror. “Why, it’s dangerous!” For no reason she took the candle and went into the bedroom, and there, reflecting what she must do, glanced casually at herself in the pier glass. With her pale, frightened face, in a jacket with sleeves high on the shoulders, with yellow ruches on her bosom, and with stripes running in unusual directions on her skirt, she seemed to herself horrible and disgusting. She suddenly felt poignantly sorry for Dymov, for his boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for the desolate little bed in which he had not slept for so long; and she remembered his habitual, gentle, submissive smile. She wept bitterly, and wrote an imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o’clock in the night. VIII When towards eight o’clock in the morning Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed, came out of her bedroom, looking unattractive and with a guilty expression on her face, a gentleman with a black beard, apparently the doctor, passed by her into the entry. There was a smell of drugs. Korostelev was standing near the study door, twisting his left moustache with his right hand. “Excuse me, I can’t let you go in,” he said surlily to Olga Ivanovna; “it’s catching. Besides, it’s no use, really; he is delirious, anyway.” “Has he really got diphtheria?” Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.