at the right times. And what’s worse still, he insists on lying in a position that surely must be bad for him—with his legs in the air.”
She described how he made Gerasim hold his legs up.
The doctor smiled with kindly condescension that said, “Oh well, it can’t be helped, these sick people do take up such foolish fancies; but we must forgive them.”
When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskovya Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyitch that it must of course be as he liked, but she had sent today for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him, and have a consultation with Mihail Danilovitch (that was the name of their regular doctor).
“Don’t oppose it now, please. This I’m doing entirely for my own sake,” she said ironically, meaning it to be understood that she was doing it all for his sake, and was only saying this to give him no right to refuse her request. He lay silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was hemmed in by such a tangle of falsity that it was hard to disentangle anything from it.