“Walk in, please,” said a maidservant, showing her into the consulting-room. “The doctor will be here in a minute. Sit down.”

Vanda sank into a soft arm-chair.

“I’ll ask him to lend it me,” she thought; “that will be quite proper, for, after all, I do know him. If only that servant would go. I don’t like to ask before her. What does she want to stand there for?”

Five minutes later the door opened and Finkel came in. He was a tall, dark Jew, with fat cheeks and bulging eyes. His cheeks, his eyes, his chest, his body, all of him was so well fed, so loathsome and repellent! At the “Renaissance” and the German Club he had usually been rather tipsy, and would spend his money freely on women, and be very long-suffering and patient with their pranks (when Vanda, for instance, poured the beer over his head, he simply smiled and shook his finger at her): now he had a cross, sleepy expression and looked solemn and frigid like a police captain, and he kept chewing something.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, without looking at Vanda.

Vanda looked at the serious countenance of the maid and the smug figure of Finkel, who apparently did not recognize her, and she turned red.

“What can I do for you?” repeated the dentist a little irritably.

“I’ve got toothache,” murmured Vanda.

“Aha! … Which is the tooth? Where?”

Vanda remembered she had a hole in one of her teeth.

“At the bottom … on the right …” she said.

“Hm! … Open your mouth.”

Finkel frowned and, holding his breath, began examining the tooth.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, digging into it with a steel instrument.

“Yes,” Vanda replied, untruthfully.

“Shall I remind him?” she was wondering. “He would be sure to remember me. But that servant! Why will she stand there?”

Finkel suddenly snorted like a steam-engine right into her mouth, and said:

“I don’t advise you to have it stopped. That tooth will never be worth keeping anyhow.”

After probing the tooth a little more and soiling Vanda’s lips and gums with his tobacco-stained fingers, he held his breath again, and put something cold into her mouth. Vanda suddenly felt a sharp pain, cried out, and clutched at Finkel’s hand.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he muttered; “don’t you be frightened! That tooth would have been no use to you, anyway … you must be brave. …”

And his tobacco-stained fingers, smeared with blood, held up the tooth to her eyes, while the maid approached and put a basin to her mouth.

“You wash out your mouth with cold water when you get home, and that will stop the bleeding,” said Finkel.