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All the young ladies were taken up with these visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev. Only one of them, dressed a la Aida, glanced sideways at him, smiled, and said, yawning: "A dark one has come...." Vassilyev's heart was throbbing and his face burned. He felt ashamed before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and miserable.
"My dear fellow, who disputes it?" said the doctor, with an expression that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long ago. "Who disputes it?" "You are a mental doctor, aren't you?" Vassilyev asked curtly. "Yes, a mental doctor." "Perhaps all of you are right!" said Vassilyev, getting up and beginning to walk from one end of the room to the other. "Perhaps!
"Because I don't know how to behave here. Besides, I am bored, disgusted. What is there amusing in it? If they were human beings but they are savages and animals. I am going; do as you like." "Come, Grisha, Grigory, darling..." said the artist in a tearful voice, hugging Vassilyev, "come along! Let's go to one more together and damnation take them!... Please do, Grisha!"
They persuaded Vassilyev and led him up a staircase. In the carpet and the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels that decorated the hall, the same S. Street style was apparent, but carried to a greater perfection, more imposing. "I really will go home!" said Vassilyev as he was taking off his coat.
And his attention was caught by one pale, rather sleepy, exhausted-looking face.... It was a dark woman, not very young, wearing a dress covered with spangles; she was sitting in an easy-chair, looking at the floor lost in thought. Vassilyev walked from one corner of the room to the other, and, as though casually, sat down beside her.
Vassilyev for some reason felt all at once unutterably sorry for himself, and his companions, and all the people he had seen two days before, and for the doctor; he burst into tears and sank into a chair. His friends looked inquiringly at the doctor.
Looking round at the furnishing of the rooms and the costumes, Vassilyev realized that this was not lack of taste, but something that might be called the taste, and even the style, of S. Street, which could not be found elsewhere something intentional in its ugliness, not accidental, but elaborated in the course of years.
It was painful to look at that face, but what must it have been for Vassilyev himself who yet had the strength to argue and, if I were not mistaken, to pose? "You here are you here ?" he asked suddenly, raising himself on his elbow. "My God, just listen!" I began listening. The rain was pattering angrily on the dark window, never ceasing for a minute. The wind howled plaintively and lugubriously.
I strained my eyes in vain, I could not recognise in the swarthy, yellow face Zina, the lively, pretty ingénue of Luhatchev's company. "Sic transit," I thought. With that I went out, not forgetting to take the revolver, and made my way to the chemist's. But I ought not to have gone away. When I came back from the chemist's, Vassilyev lay on the sofa fainting.
As it was, Vassilyev could not understand it at all. He recalled the story of the fallen woman he had once read, and he thought now that that human figure with the guilty smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing now.
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