Perhaps it is an essential concomitant of a physician's genius. HOFFMANN Maybe so. Anyhow, our doctor _has_ a conscience. He's a bit of an idealist--more or less our kind. His success among the miners and the peasants is simply phenomenal! Sometimes, I must say, he isn't an easy man to bear, he's got a mixture of hardness and sentimentality. But, as I said before, I know how to value conscientiousness; no doubt about that. But before I forget ... I do attach some importance to it ... a man ought to know what he has to look out for ... Listen!... Tell me ... I see it in your face. Those gentlemen at the next table had nothing good to say of me? Tell me, please, what they did say. LOTH I really ought not to do that, for I was going to beg one hundred crowns of you, literally beg, for there is hardly any chance of my ever being able to return them. HOFFMANN [_Draws a cheque-book from his inner pocket, makes out a cheque and hands it to LOTH._] Any branch of the Imperial Bank will cash it ... It's simply a pleasure.... LOTH Your promptness surpasses all expectation. Well, I accept it with, gratitude, and you know--it could be worse spent. HOFFMANN [_Somewhat rhetorically._] A labourer is worthy of his hire. But now, Loth, have the goodness to tell me what the gentlemen in question.... LOTH I dare say they talked nonsense. HOFFMANN Tell me in spite of that, please. I'm simply interested, quite simply interested--that's all. LOTH They discussed the fact that you had violently forced another man out of his position here--a contractor named Mueller. HOFFMANN _Of_ course! The same old story. LOTH The man, they said, was betrothed to your present wife. HOFFMANN So he was. And what else? LOTH I tell you these things just as I heard them, for I assume that it is of some importance to you to be acquainted with the exact nature of the slander. HOFFMANN Quite right. And so? LOTH So far as I could make out this Mueller was said to have had the contract for the construction of a stretch of mountain railroad here. HOFFMANN Yes, with a wretched capital of ten thousand crowns. When he came to see that the money wouldn't go far enough, he was in haste to make a catch of one of the Witzdorf farmers' daughters; the honour was to have fallen to my wife. LOTH They said that he had his arrangement with the daughter, and you had made yours with the father.--Next he shot himself, didn't he?--And you finished the construction of his section of the road and made a great deal of money out of it? HOFFMANN There's an element of truth in all that. Of course, I could give you a very different notion of how those things hung together. Perhaps they knew a few more of these edifying anecdotes. LOTH