“Equanimity! Nonsense! Doesn’t enter the question.” He stood, as was his habit, with legs stretched far apart, rocking to and fro a little, and regarding his gleaming boots. “What has equanimity to do with it? We’re cultivated people. I’m neither a tiger nor a Philistine. Nihil humanum a me alienum, et cetera. You simply don’t know me. And it doesn’t astonish me, for what chance have we ever had to cultivate each other’s acquaintance? Marriage gave us no opportunity. We should retrieve our lost occasions. It is this wish that I should like to take with me into my renewed bachelorhood. You must promise not to avoid me as rigorously in the future as you did during the eight months of our married life.” “If it will give you any pleasure, I promise gladly,” Judith answered good-humouredly. With that they parted. An hour later Felix Imhof sat in the train. With protruding eyes he stared at the passing landscape until darkness fell. He desired conversation, argument, the relief of some projection of his inner self. With wrinkled brow he watched the strangers about him who knew nothing of him or his inner wealth, of his great, rolling ideas, or his far-reaching plans. At Düsseldorf he left the train. He had made up his mind to do so at the last possible moment. He checked his luggage, and huddled in his coat, walked, a tall, lean figure, through the midnight of the dark and ancient streets. He stopped in front of one of the oldest houses. In this house he had passed his youth. All the windows were dark. “Hello, boy!” he shouted toward the window behind which he had once slept. The walls echoed his voice. “O nameless boy,” he said, “where do you come from?” He was accustomed to say of himself often: “I am of obscure origin like Caspar Hauser.” But no secret weighed upon him, not even that of his own unknown descent. He was a man of his decade--stripped of mystery, open to all the winds. He entered a house, which he remembered from his student days. In a large room, lined with greasy mirrors, there were fifteen or twenty half-dressed girls. In his hat and coat he sat down at the piano and played with the false energy of the dilettante. “Girls,” he said, “I’ve got a mad rage in me!” The girls played tricks on him as he sat there. They hung a crimson shawl over his shoulders and danced. “I’m in a rage, girls,” he repeated. “It’s got to be drowned out.” He ordered champagne by the pailful. The doors were locked. The girls screeched with delight. “Do something to relieve my misery, girls,” he commanded, bade half a dozen stand in a row and open their mouths. Then he rolled up hundred mark notes like cigarettes, and stuck them between the girls’ teeth. They almost smothered him with their caresses. And he drank and drank until he lost consciousness. XIX Christian could not be without Eva. If he left her for the shortest period, the world about him grew dark.