In indescribable excitement, and as quickly as her obese body would permit, the Baroness leaped to her feet: “I know you better,” she said with trembling lips, “I have been able to foreshadow what is driving you about; I have seen what makes you so restless. You are not the man you pretend to be; you are not the cold, heartless creature you seem. In your breast there is a spot where you are vulnerable, and there you have been struck. You are bleeding, man! If we all, I and your daughter and your brothers and your friends and your cowardly creatures, are as indifferent and despicable to you as so many flies, there is one who has been able to wound you; this fact is gnawing at your heart. And do you know why he was in a position to wound you? Because you loved him. Look me in the eye, and tell me that I lie. You loved him—your son—you idolised him. The fact that he has repudiated your love, that he found it of no value to him, the love that blossomed on the ruined lives of his mother and sister, this is the cause of your sorrow. It is written across your brow. And that you are suffering, and suffering for this reason, constitutes my revenge.” The Baron did not say a word; his lower jaw wagged from left to right as though he were chewing something; his face seemed to have dried up; he looked as though he had suddenly become older by years. The Baroness, driven from her reserve, stood before him like an enraged sibyl. He turned in silence, and left the room. “My suffering is her revenge,” he murmured on leaving the room. Once alone, he stood for a while perfectly absent-minded. “Am I really suffering?” he said to himself. He turned off a gas jet that was burning above the book case. “Yes, I am suffering,” he confessed reluctantly; “I am suffering.” He walked along the wall with dragging feet, and entered a room in which a light was burning. He felt the same satiety and disgust at himself that he had experienced a few moments earlier. This time it was caused by the sight of the hand-carved furniture, the painted porcelain, the precious tapestries, and the oil paintings in their gold frames. He longed for simpler things; he longed for barren walls, a cot of straw, parsimony, discipline. It was not the first time that his exhausted organism had sought consolation in the thought of a monastic life. This Protestant, this descendent of a long line of Protestants, had long been tired of Protestantism. He regarded the Roman Church as the more wholesome and merciful. But the transformation of his religious views was his own carefully guarded secret. And secret it had to remain until he, the undisciplined son of his mother, could atone for his past misdeeds. He decided to wait until this atonement had been effected. Just as a hypnotist gains control of his medium by inner composure, so he thought he could hasten the coming of this event by conceding it absolute supremacy over his mind. III