No one on FR has ever quoted Russian literature to me.
Marry me. Damn Xena's Guy. Damn the law.
(The real question is what the third drink does.)
"... For example, by the age of eighteen I have noticed that from the first dose to the fifth I was maturing, i.e. maturing irresistibly, but starting from the sixth and up to and including the ninth - I softened. Softened so much that from the tenth dose I fell asleep, equally irresistibly. And what did I think in my naiveté? I thought: it's necessary to overcome sleepiness by willpower and to drink the eleventh dose - then, maybe, maturing will resume.
No. No resumptions, I have tried.
I worked on this problem for three years, every day I tried, and every day I fell asleep after the tenth dose.
And everything was so simple: it turned out that if you've already drunk the fifth, you should drink the sixth, the seventh, the eighth and the ninth - all at once, but to drink ideally, i.e. to drink only in imagination. In other words, you should, by one stride of will - not drink either the sixth or the seventh or the eighth or the ninth.
And, after the pause, you should drink the tenth dose, and, just as the Ninth symphony of Antonin Dvorzhak is conventionally called the Fifth, so you conditionally call your sixth dose the tenth and then you can be sure: now you'll mature without interruption from the sixth (tenth) to the very twenty eighth (thirty-second) dose, i.e. to the limit after which insanity and swinery follow...."