Vreni instantly would respond to the calls of joy if the occasion was at all favorable, as a flower after drooping in a heavy rainstorm will raise its head at the first rays of the reappearing sun. Sali was not faring quite so ill. He was a good-looking and vigorous young fellow who knew how to take care of himself and whose size and physical strength alone would have forbidden harsh bodily mistreatment. He saw, of course, how his parents were sliding down-hill more and more, and he seemed to remember a time when things had been otherwise. He even carried in his memory the picture of his father as that of an upstanding, determined, serious and energetic peasant, while now he saw before him all the while a man who was a gray-headed dolt, a quarrelsome fool, who with all his fits of impotent rage and all his brag and bluster was every hour more and more crawling backwards like a crawfish. But when these things displeased him and filled him with shame and sorrow, although he could not very well understand how it all had come about, the influence of his mother came to deaden this feeling and to fill him with an unjustified hope of improvement. She would flatter her son in the same extravagant and wholly unreasonable manner which had become her second nature in dealing with the new troubles that were gradually overcoming the whole family. For in order to lead her life of self-indulgence the more easily and to have one critical observer the less, and to make her son her partisan, but also as a vent for her love of display, she contrived to let her son have everything he had a desire for. She saw to it that he was always dressed with care, and entirely too expensively for the means of the family, and indulged him in his pleasures. He on his part accepted all that without much thought or gratitude, since he noticed at the same time how his mother was juggling with and tricking his father, and how she was continually telling untruths and vainly boasting. And while thus allowing his mother to spoil him without paying much attention to the process itself, no great harm was yet done in his case, since he had so far not been much tainted by the vices and sins of mother or father. Indeed, in his youthful pride he had the strong wish to become, if possible, a man such as he recalled his own father once to have been, a man of substance and of rational and successful conduct of his life. Sali was really very much as his father knew himself to have been at his own age, and a queer remnant of respectability urged the father to treat his son well. In honoring him he seemed to honor his old self. Confused reminiscences at such times drifted through his beclouded soul, and they afforded him a species of subconscious delight. But although in this manner Sali escaped some of the natural consequences of the process of domestic decay which was going on around him, he was not able to genuinely enjoy his life and to make rational plans for an assured future.