From the town, lapped in slumber, it seemed as if the spirit of the age rushed into his room--an age fraught with dangers, demands, and tension of all kinds. It demanded men--demanded of all men all their ambition, self-discipline, intelligence, selflessness ... selflessness. It should take him! There he was, free alike from arrogance and from indolence! Might there not be, he asked himself in his ecstatic monologue, a new democracy which should redeem the past? Was that the goal towards which the present gloom was leading mankind? Was he rising on the stormy wave? He would no longer drift along, striving to help his country as a mere idealist. No, he would stand firm on his feet; struggle, contest, but not submit! Freed from thoughts of self, he would expend the last drop of his blood to become what he had learned to be; he would yield all he had to give, to the very last red drop. It was not his career that was at stake, but that which all men have in common, both in conflict with each other and in helping one another. It was the surge of humanity in which mortals, for good or ill, were engulfed in a gloom which none could dominate and subdue. In that night of reflection the lawyer saw the criminal no longer as a being of an inferior order. He envisaged him as a man whose pulses raced madly along, his senses stirred by the powers of hell; a man whose lusts and appetites, demon-fed, should overreach themselves and be brought to nought, and he, Wenk, should save and deliver him. The fighter should gain the ascendancy over his adversary. In imagination Wenk was now struggling with the blond stranger, and in him he had a powerful opponent. He suspected even more than he already knew. If he could relieve mankind of him, he would have accomplished something by which he could advance further. The song which Wenk’s heart had been singing for the last two hours suddenly seemed to be familiar to him, and in astonishment he realized that the state to which he had now come had been foreshadowed in his boyhood’s days, even before his university career, his military training, and his entry into law, when as yet no idea of the justification of humanity had fired his blood. Thinking over his lonely bachelor existence, without any womanly influence, he felt a strange, sad yearning for the father who had died long before. The next day Wenk asked Hull to procure for him a list of all the secret gambling-dens, the addresses of which might be obtained with the help of Cara, who was _au courant_ of such matters. He made Hull promise, however, that he would not speak to the girl of himself in this connection. Wenk visited these places evening by evening. He went disguised as a rich old gentleman from the provinces. He had chosen this disguise, first of all, because he had an excellent example of it in an elderly uncle whom he merely had to copy. The old gentleman gave the impression that he was thoroughly enjoying all his experiences of the great city.