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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? I put on fleshly form and I take the consequences.Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto."** I am Satan, and deem nothing human alien to me.

"What, what, Satan sum et nihil humanum...that's not bad for the devil!""I am glad I've pleased you at last."

"But you didn't get that from me." Ivan stopped suddenly, seeming struck."That never entered my head, that's strange.""C'est du nouveau, n'est-ce pas?"* This time I'll act honestly and explain to you.Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.Yet such dreams are sometimes seen not by writers, but by the most ordinary people, officials, journalists, priests....The subject is a complete enigma.A statesman confessed to me, indeed, that all his best ideas came to him when he was asleep.

Well, that's how it is now, though I am your hallucination, yet just as in a nightmare, I say original things which had not entered your head before.So I don't repeat your ideas, yet I am only your nightmare, nothing more."* It's new, isn't it?

"You are lying, your aim is to convince me you exist apart and are not my nightmare, and now you are asserting you are a dream.""My dear fellow, I've adopted a special method to-day, I'll explain it to you afterwards.Stay, where did I break off? Oh, yes!

I caught cold then, only not here but yonder.""Where is yonder? Tell me, will you be here long.Can't you go away?" Ivan exclaimed almost in despair.He ceased walking to and fro, sat down on the sofa, leaned his elbows on the table again and held his head tight in both hands.He pulled the wet towel off and flung it away in vexation.It was evidently of no use.

"Your nerves are out of order," observed the gentleman, with a carelessly easy, though perfectly polite, air."You are angry with me even for being able to catch cold, though it happened in a most natural way.I was hurrying then to a diplomatic soiree at the house of a lady of high rank in Petersburg, who was aiming at influence in the Ministry.Well, an evening suit, white tie, gloves, though I was God knows where and had to fly through space to reach your earth....

Of course, it took only an instant, but you know a ray of light from the sun takes full eight minutes, and fancy in an evening suit and open waistcoat.Spirits don't freeze, but when one's in fleshly form, well...in brief, I didn't think, and set off, and you know in those ethereal spaces, in the water that is above the firmament, there's such a frost...at least one can't call it frost, you fancy, 150 degrees below zero! You know the game the village girls play- they invite the unwary to lick an axe in thirty degrees of frost, the tongue instantly freezes to it and the dupe tears the skin off, so it bleeds.But that's only in 30 degrees, in 150 degrees I imagine it would be enough to put your finger on the axe and it would be the end of it...if only there could be an axe there.""And can there be an axe there?" Ivan interrupted, carelessly and disdainfully.He was exerting himself to the utmost not to believe in the delusion and not to sink into complete insanity "An axe?" the guest interrupted in surprise.

"Yes, what would become of an axe there?" Ivan cried suddenly, with a sort of savage and insistent obstinacy.

"What would become of an axe in space? Quelle idee! If it were to fall to any distance, it would begin, I think, flying round the earth without knowing why, like a satellite.The astronomers would calculate the rising and the setting of the axe; Gatzuk would put it in his calendar, that's all.""You are stupid, awfully stupid," said Ivan peevishly."Fib more cleverly or I won't listen.You want to get the better of me by realism, to convince me that you exist, but I don't want to believe you exist! I won't believe it!""But I am not fibbing, it's all the truth; the truth is unhappily hardly ever amusing.I see you persist in expecting something big of me, and perhaps something fine.That's a great pity, for I only give what I can-""Don't talk philosophy, you ass!"