She had no direct proofs that Klutz was not serious and contemplative, but during his first winter in their house he had fallen into her bad graces because of a certain indelicately appreciative attitude he displayed towards her apple jelly. Not that she grudged him apple jelly in just quantities; both she and her husband were fond of it, and the eating of it was luckily one of those pleasures whose indulgence is innocent. But there are limits beyond which even jelly becomes vicious, and these limits Herr Klutz continually overstepped. Every autumn she made a sufficient number of pots of it to last discreet appetites a whole year. There had always been vicars in their house, and there had never been a dearth of jelly. But this year, so early as Easter, there were only two pots left. She could not conveniently lock it up and refuse to produce any, for then she and her husband would not have it themselves; so all through the winter she had watched the pots being emptied one after the other, and the thinner the rows in her storeroom grew, the more pronounced became her conviction that Klutz's piety was but skin deep. A young man who could behave in so unbridled a fashion could not be really serious; there was something, she thought, that smacked suspiciously of the flesh and the devil about such conduct. Great, then, was her astonishment when, the penultimate pot being placed at Easter on the table, Klutz turned from it with loathing. Nor did he ever look at apple jelly again; nor did he, of other viands, eat enough to keep him in health. He who had been so voracious forgot his meals, and had to be coaxed before he would eat at all. He spent his spare time writing, sitting up sometimes all night, and consuming candles at the same head-long rate with which he had previously consumed the jelly; and when towards May her husband once more commented on his seriousness, Frau Manske's conscience no longer permitted her to sniff. "You must be ill," she said to him at last, on a day when he had sat through the meals in silence and had refused to eat at all. "Ill!" burst out Klutz, whose body and soul seemed both to be in one fierce blaze of fever, "I am sick--sick even unto death."