"Ah, now I have caught it, as usual," he cried. "All our life long we have had these scenes. When we were fourth-form boys--well, you know what it used to be. Once when I tore myself from you because I got bored with philosophising in your company about the good of humanity, and preferred to lie under the garden hedge with Rupp and Sydow to bombard the pretty girls as they went by with paper pellets, then I got a note--'You are insincere ... a traitor ... I will do away with myself.' ... Ay, the devil take your confounded heroics." He stood up and soothed his friend, who sank back again on the sofa-cushions, and caressed comically his bristly hair. "There, there, little girlie," he laughed. "So long as you live you won't get rid of me, good for nothing that I am. Who would nurse you and stroke your head when the white mice bother you? and who would preach morality to me and cram worn-out wisdom into me when I got into scrapes, if----" He stopped suddenly and cast a side-long glance at the keyhole; then seized an empty bottle and hurled it with a kind of war-whoop at the hinges of the door, so that it smashed to pieces in contact with the iron. Ulrich sprang up in horror. "What has happened?" he asked. "Nothing much," Leo explained, perfectly calm again. "Only a worm of a head waiter was sneaking around, probably to listen to us, so I tried to give him his death-blow." Ulrich looked at him in bewilderment. "You think I have roughened somewhat out there amongst savages, eh?" Leo asked, with a good-natured laugh. "But never mind, I have come back to you sound and whole. A fellow who has sifted and proved himself, so that at this moment he doubts whether in the whole of God's earthly garden there grows a finer specimen than his lowly self. Sometimes when I have had to go six months without anything to eat, I have been able to subsist on my self-satisfaction, as the bear sucks its paws, and grown fatter. I have a magnificent maxim, which is 'Repent nothing.' And if at one time I was a wild customer, and have my conscience loaded to the utmost capacity, nevertheless I have been able to enjoy myself, and must be content. Only woe to him who reminds me of it. I will pay him out by bringing home to him all the vexation and resentment it has cost me. Then what has a man got faults for, if he mayn't be revenged for them on some one else?" "A comfortable philosophy," laughed Ulrich.