His father interrupted him as he played with the card. "I don't doubt your knowledge or your energy or your industry, but it seems to me that to be able to do any particular good in the sphere of public health you need as well as those excellent qualities another one too, which in my view you only have to a very small extent: kindness, my dear Berthold, love of mankind." Berthold shook his head vehemently. "I regard the love of humanity which you mean, father, as absolutely superfluous and rather injurious. Pity--and what else can loving people whom one doesn't personally know really be?--necessarily leads to sentimentalism, to weakness. And when one wants to help whole groups of men then, above all, you must be able to be hard at times, hard to individuals--yes, be ready in fact to sacrifice them if the common good demands it. You only need to consider, father, that the most honest and consistent social hygiene would have the direct result of annihilating diseased people, or at any rate excluding them from all enjoyment of life, and I don't deny that I have all kinds of ideas tending in that way which may seem cruel at the first glance. But the future, I think, belongs to ideas. You needn't be afraid, father, that I shall begin straight away to preach the murder of the unhealthy and the superfluous. But theoretically that's certainly what my programme leads to. Do you know, by the way, whom I had a very interesting conversation with the other day on this very subject?" "What subject do you mean?" "To put it precisely, a conversation on the right to kill. With Heinrich Bermann the author, the son of the late Deputy." "But where did you get the opportunity of seeing him then?" "The other day at a meeting. Therese Golowski brought him along. You know him, too, don't you, father?" "Yes," replied the old man, "I've known him for quite a long time." And he added: "I met him again this year in the summer at Anna Rosner's." Berthold's eyebrows again twitched violently. Then he said sarcastically: "I thought it was something like that. Bermann mentioned, you know, that he had seen you some time ago, but he wouldn't remember exactly where. I concluded that it must have been a case of--discretion. I see. So the Herr Baron thought he would introduce his friends into her house." "My dear Berthold, your tone seems to suggest that you have not got over a certain matter as completely as you previously hinted." Berthold shrugged his shoulders. "I have never denied that I have an antipathy for Baron Wergenthin. That is why the whole business was so painful to me from the very beginning." "Is that why?" "Yes." "And yet I think, Berthold, that you would regard the matter differently if you were to meet Anna Rosner again some time or other as a widow--even assuming that her late husband was even more antipathetic to you than Baron von Wergenthin."