Her attitude to him and his illness is still the same. Just as the doctor had taken up a certain line with the patient which he was not now able to drop, so she too had taken up a line with him⁠—that he was not doing something he ought to do, and was himself to blame, and she was lovingly reproaching him for his neglect, and she could not now get out of this attitude.

“Why, you know, he won’t listen to me; he doesn’t take his medicine 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.”