As he stood before the magistrate a few hours later, an incredulous sneer was on his face, as though the man at the desk above him were a pompous, talkative scarecrow, and with a stubborn silence he confronted the questions that were thrown at him. In a low, hesitating voice his father declared that he feared that his son had become insane, and the judge ordered an examination by one of the city physicians. Carl was returned to his cell, after his parents had pelted him with half-angry and half-bewildered sentences in an ante-room of the court, and as he sat again in his cell, surveying the rigid jeer of the iron bars, his hatred began to listen to the advice of cunning--a cunning pilfered from the wilted depths of his despair. He began to see that physical blows and silence were crude and ineffective weapons in his attack upon the insulting commotion of life and that, if he desired to injure human beings so that both he and they might become real for a moment, he must use more indirect and ingenious methods. When the city physician, a tall, briskly-balanced man with no imagination, questioned him in his cell, he became a blandly appealing and submissive actor. “Yes, doctor, I had a nervous breakdown from overstudy, you know, and for a time I’m afraid that I lost my reason. They tell me that I struck my father and this has horrified me, as I haven’t the slightest recollection of what I did. But I’ve gathered myself together now and I can promise you that I’ll never lose control of myself again--never! And I’m awfully sorry for what I did. I can assure you of the sincerity of my repentance.” The physician was putty in Carl’s adroit hands--this composed young man with an intelligent, contrite speech must, of course, be quite sane. Carl, as he spoke to this man, slowly formed an evil grin beneath the cool mask of his face, and he relished the task of showering upon this man earnest platitudes, smooth imitations of that limited sleep known as “common sense,” and words of self-reproach, because this trickery brought back to him his old sense of power over his surroundings and offered a subtle outlet for his hatred of life. The physician ended by shaking his hand with a genial respect and when evening came he was given his freedom.