Towards evening some unsatisfactory symptoms really showed themselves, but Nicholas Semyónovitch thought that after that everything would be all right. However, the fact that the doctor was called proved that things had taken a bad turn.

When he did go in, he found his wife in the nursery, dressed in a favourite bright-coloured silk dressing-gown, about which, however, she was not thinking at that moment, and holding a guttering candle for the doctor, who, with his pince-nez on his nose and a very attentive expression on his face, was carefully making an examination. “Yes,” she said meaningly, “it is all on account of those confounded strawberries.”

“What of the strawberries?” Nicholas Semyónovitch asked timidly.

“What of the strawberries?⁠ ⁠… It’s you that fed him on them, and here am I, not having a wink of sleep all night⁠ ⁠… and the child will die!”