Please don't laugh, that's just what I like, to become superstitious.I adopt all your habits here: I've grown fond of going to the public baths, would you believe it? and I go and steam myself with merchants and priests.What I dream of is becoming incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant's wife weighing eighteen stone, and of believing all she believes.My ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith, upon my word it is.Then there would be an end to my sufferings.I like being doctored too; in the spring there was an outbreak of smallpox and I went and was vaccinated in a foundling hospital- if only you knew how I enjoyed myself that day.I subscribed ten roubles in the cause of the Slavs!...But you are not listening.
Do you know, you are not at all well this evening? I know you went yesterday to that doctor...well, what about your health? What did the doctor say?""Fool!" Ivan snapped out.
"But you are clever, anyway.You are scolding again? I didn't ask out of sympathy.You needn't answer.Now rheumatism has come in again-""Fool!" repeated Ivan.
"You keep saying the same thing; but I had such an attack of rheumatism last year that I remember it to this day.""The devil have rheumatism!"
"Why not, if I sometimes put on fleshly form?