The laugh grew shriller and shriller, and became something like the
bark of a lap-dog. Laevsky tried to get up from the table, but his
legs would not obey him and his right hand was strangely, without
his volition, dancing on the table, convulsively clutching and
crumpling up the bits of paper. He saw looks of wonder, Samoylenko's
grave, frightened face, and the eyes of the zoologist full of cold
irony and disgust, and realised that he was in hysterics.

"How hideous, how shameful!" he thought, feeling the warmth of tears
on his face. ". . . Oh, oh, what a disgrace! It has never happened
to me. . . ."

They took him under his arms, and supporting his head from behind,
led him away; a glass gleamed before his eyes and knocked against
his teeth, and the water was spilt on his breast; he was in a little
room, with two beds in the middle, side by side, covered by two
snow-white quilts. He dropped on one of the beds and sobbed.

"It's nothing, it's nothing," Samoylenko kept saying; "it does
happen . . . it does happen. . . ."

Chill with horror, trembling all over and dreading something awful,
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna stood by the bedside and kept asking:

"What is it? What is it? For God's sake, tell me."

"Can Kirilin have written him something?" she thought.

"It's nothing," said Laevsky, laughing and crying; "go away, darling."