He was still under the sway of the feeling that he was not sufficiently experienced in life and that he dare not venture out into the light for existence in the great turmoil of the world. He saw in this struggle, which pitted man against man, led to exhibitions of violence, and aroused ambition for glittering unrealities, cause only for disgust and alienation. The prospect of personal success did not lure him to try force against force. Thus, for the time being, it was his ideal to lead a very modest existence. From various quarters he had been given hopes of a position as assistant to some professor of physics or mathematics. But for unknown reasons he was everywhere refused. These apparently obscure grounds, it must be said with regret, become clearer when we bear in mind his confession of faith. Nor did his hopes of teaching at a gymnasium seem near fulfilment, as certain conditions of birth raised obstacles. In the first place, he was not a Swiss; in fact, since his stay in Milan he was without a nationality at all in the bureaucratic sense, and then he had no personal connexions, without which, at least at that time, there was no chance of progress even for a talented person. Yet the young student who was entirely without protection of any sort had to overcome the cares and satisfy the needs of daily life. He could not rely on material help from his parents, who themselves lived in restricted circumstances, and thus we find him a little later in Schaffhausen and Bern, where he earned a small pittance as a private tutor. He found consolation in the fact that he preserved a certain independence, which meant the more to him as his instinct for freedom led him to discover the essential things in himself. Thus, earlier, too, during his studies at Zürich he had carried on his work in theoretical physics at home, almost entirely apart from the lectures at the Polytechnic, plunging himself into the writings of Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, Boltzmann, and Drude. Disregarding chronological order, we must here mention that he found a partner in these studies who was working in a similar direction, a Southern Slavonic student, whom he married in the year 1903. This union was dissolved after a number of years. Later he found the ideal of domestic happiness at the side of a woman whose grace is matched by her intelligence, Else Einstein, his cousin, whom he married in Berlin.