Midnight approaches. The smoky lamp burns more dimly and outside on the streets life begins to die out. Only from time to time the snow crunches and groans under the hurrying foot of some belated and freezing passer-by. The reflection of the gas lamps rests upon the frozen windows as though a yellow veil had been drawn before them. In the room hovers a dull heat which weighs upon my brain and even amid shivering wrings the sweat from my pores. I had the fire started again toward night for I was cold. Now I am no longer cold. "Take care of yourself," my friend the doctor said to me, "you have worked yourself to pieces and must rest." "Rest, rest"--the word sounds like a gnome's irony from all the corners of my room, for my work is heaping up on all sides and threatens to smother me. "Work! Work!" This is the voice of conscience. It is like the voice of a brutal waggoner that would urge a dead ass on to new efforts. My paper is in its place. For hours I have sat and stared at it brooding. It is still empty. A disagreeably sweetish odour which arises impudently to my nose makes me start. There stands the pitcher of herb tea which my landlady brought in at bedtime. The dear woman. "Man must sweat," she had declared. "If the whole man gets into a sweat then the evil humours are exuded, and the healthy sap gets a chance to circulate until one is full of it." And saying that she wiped her greasy lips for she likes to eat a piece of rye bread with goose grease before going to bed. Irritatedly I push the little pitcher aside, but its grayish green steam whirls only the more pertinaciously about me. The clouds assume strange forms, which tower over each other and whirl into each other like the phantoms over a witch's cauldron. And at last the fumes combine into a human form, at first misty and without outlines but gradually becoming more sharply defined. Gray, gray, gray. An aged woman. So she seems, for she creeps along by the help of a crutch. But over her face is a veil which falls to the ground over her arms like the folded wings of a bat. I begin to laugh, for spirits have long ceased to inspire me with reverence. "Is your name by any chance Thea, O lovely, being?" I ask. "My name is Thea," she answers and her voice is weary, gentle and a little hoarse. A caressing shimmer as of faintly blue velvet, an insinuating fragrance as of dying mignonette--both lie in this voice. The voice fills my heart. But I won't be taken in, least of all by some trite ghost which is in the end only a vision of one's own sick brain. "It seems that the years have not changed you for the better, charming Thea," I say and point sarcastically to the crutch. "My wings are broken and I am withered like yourself."