But the disintegration of the puritan was accomplished through the influence of new friends. One of these decided to cure the hungry dreamer in Strindberg by a good meal. One day on the way to the Greek lesson, Fritz, "the friend with the eye-glasses," suggested that they should play truant and lunch at a restaurant. Scruples overcome, August enjoyed his first meal in a restaurant and his first glass of brandy. The luxuries of beefsteak and beer in quantitative perfection, and the audacity with which his friend treated the waiter, made a profound impression on him. The friend paid for the feast, and August came out a changed man. "This was not an empty pleasure, as the pale man had asserted," he writes. "No, it was a solid pleasure to feel red blood run through half-empty arteries which were to nourish the nerves for the struggle of life. It was a pleasure to feel spent strength return and the lax sinews of a half-crushed will stretched again. Hope was awakened, the mist became a rosy cloud, and the friend let him see glimpses of the future as it was formed by friendship and youth." The friend advised him to earn money by giving private lessons. This would secure freedom from parental tyranny. He encouraged independence and self-confidence in August, who, acting upon his advice, obtained a post as private tutor. By exercising economy in the expenditure of brains at the gymnasium and limiting his studies to those absolutely necessary for the final examen, he succeeded in his dual work of learner and teacher. The sense of sin departed; he was able to take part in the festivities of his school-fellows. The platonic friendship with the woman of thirty evaporated with the advent of a less ethereal admiration for the beauty of waitresses _et hoc genus omne_. He went to dances and sought jollity in the "punsch-evenings" of the students. A craving for alcohol had been aroused; under its influence the demons of gloom and insoluble problems departed. The change in his attitude to life was hastened by an influence which now made itself felt for the first time. Literature as a great tradition and interpretation of human problems became known to him. The belletristic and the puritanical conceptions of life presented themselves in their profoundest antithesis. Natural selection did the rest. His range of reading was wide and varied, as were the demands of his many-sided self. He devoured Shakespeare, admired Dickens, found Walter Scott tedious, Alexandre Dumas puerile, and Eugène Sue's Le Juif Errant grandiose. He detested poetry; it was affected and untrue. People did not talk in that manner and seldom thought of such beautiful things. The realisation of God in Nature replaced the desire to seek God in the churches, and August gradually discovered that he was a freethinker. The alarm and public prayers of the elect, which he had deserted, did not alter his course.