When, listless and dissatisfied, he returned home the service was over.  Yegor Semyonitch and Tanya were sitting on the steps of the verandah, drinking tea.  They were talking of something, but, seeing Kovrin, ceased at once, and he concluded from their faces that their talk had been about him.

“I believe it is time for you to have your milk,” Tanya said to her husband.

“No, it is not time yet . . .” he said, sitting down on the bottom step.  “Drink it yourself; I don’t want it.”

Tanya exchanged a troubled glance with her father, and said in a guilty voice: 

“You notice yourself that milk does you good.”

“Yes, a great deal of good!” Kovrin laughed.  “I congratulate you:  I have gained a pound in weight since Friday.”  He pressed his head tightly in his hands and said miserably:  “Why, why have you cured me?  Preparations of bromide, idleness, hot baths, supervision, cowardly consternation at every mouthful, at every step—­all this will reduce me at last to idiocy.  I went out of my mind, I had megalomania; but then I was cheerful, confident, and even happy; I was interesting and original.  Now I have become more sensible and stolid, but I am just like every one else:  I am—­mediocrity; I am weary of life. . . .  Oh, how cruelly you have treated me! . . .  I saw hallucinations, but what harm did that do to any one?  I ask, what harm did that do any one?”

“Goodness knows what you are saying!” sighed Yegor Semyonitch.  “It’s positively wearisome to listen to it.”

“Then don’t listen.”

The presence of other people, especially Yegor Semyonitch, irritated Kovrin now; he answered him drily, coldly, and even rudely, never looked at him but with irony and hatred, while Yegor Semyonitch was overcome with confusion and cleared his throat guiltily, though he was not conscious of any fault in himself.  At a loss to understand why their charming and affectionate relations had changed so abruptly, Tanya huddled up to her father and looked anxiously in his face; she wanted to understand and could not understand, and all that was clear to her was that their relations were growing worse and worse every day, that of late her father had begun to look much older, and her husband had grown irritable, capricious, quarrelsome and uninteresting.  She could not laugh or sing; at dinner she ate nothing; did not sleep for nights together, expecting something awful, and was so worn out that on one occasion she lay in a dead faint from dinner-time till evening.  During the service she thought her father was crying, and now while the three of them were sitting together on the terrace she made an effort not to think of it.

“How fortunate Buddha, Mahomed, and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their inspiration,” said Kovrin.  “If Mahomed had taken bromide for his nerves, had worked only two hours out of the twenty-four, and had drunk milk, that remarkable man would have left no more trace after him than his dog.  Doctors and kind relations will succeed in stupefying mankind, in making mediocrity pass for genius and in bringing civilisation to ruin.  If only you knew,” Kovrin said with annoyance, “how grateful I am to you.”