A few days later, however, he said, quite of his own free will, sighing like a man who has gone through some great moral struggle and come out of it victorious, “Well, do as you think best, my child, but don’t let me know anything about it.” His argument, had he expressed it in so many words, would have been something like the following: We are poor; we are living from hand to mouth. The negligible dowry Herr Carovius gave his sister has been used up. Marguerite would have been perfectly justified in putting in her claim for thirty thousand marks, but Herr Carovius settled with her for only twelve thousand, and there was no possibility of redress. For Herr Carovius had wheedled his sister into giving him a written statement that she was satisfied with the sum of twelve thousand: the remaining eighteen thousand was the price he demanded in return for her consent to have his sister, who was slavishly submissive to him, marry the man of her choice. “I have been duped,” said Andreas Döderlein, and bore up under his grudge with becoming dignity. The director of the conservatory died, and Andreas Döderlein, who, by virtue of his achievements and his personality, had the first right to the vacant position, was appointed to it. His former colleagues were stout in their contention that the appointment cost him many a bitter visit to the powers that be. Döderlein read envy in their eyes and smiled to himself. But it was a hard life. “Art cannot live without bread,” said Döderlein, with a heroic glance into the future. “But oh, what works I could bring out if I only had time! Give me time, time, and,” swinging his hands cloudward, “the eagles above would greet me!” IX Herr Carovius and death were intimate friends. Whenever death had an errand to run, it always knocked on Herr Carovius’s door, as if to find a person who approved of its deeds and who had a just appreciation of them, for there were so many of the other kind. But when Herr Carovius heard that Eleanore Nothafft had died, he felt that his old friend had gone a bit too far. He was touched. He was seized with griping pains in the abdominal region, and locked himself up for the period of one whole day in his court room. There he was taken down with catalepsy; his face went through a horrible transformation: it came to look as if all the wickedness, hopelessness, and despair of the man who had never become reconciled to life through love had been concentrated in it and petrified. His forebodings had come true.