The Privy Councillor fell silent. Only a gentle swaying of his trunk gave evidence that inwardly he was a broken man. Up to this moment he had nursed a hope; he had not believed in the inevitable. He had followed a faint beam of light, which had now vanished and left him in the darkness. His heart crumbled in a vain love for the son who had faced him with an inevitability which he could not comprehend. And all that he had conquered in this world--power, wealth, honours, a golden station in a realm of splendour--suddenly became to him frightfully meaningless and desolate. Once more he heard Christian’s clear and gentle voice. “You wanted to fetter me through my inheritance; you sought to buy me with it. I came to see that one must escape that snare. One must break even with the love of those who proclaim: ‘You are ours, our property, and must continue what we have begun.’ I could not be your heir; I could not continue what you had begun, so I was in a snare. All whom I knew lived in delight and all lived in guilt; yet though there was so much guilt, no one was guilty. There was, in fact, a fundamental mistake in the whole structure of life. I said to myself: the guilt that arises from what men do is small and scarcely comparable to the guilt that arises from what they fail to do. For what kinds of men are those, after all, who become guilty through their deeds? Poor, wretched, driven, desperate, half-mad creatures, who lift themselves up and bite the foot that treads them under. Yet they are made responsible and held guilty and punished with endless torments. But those who are guilty through failure in action are spared and are always secure, and have ready and reasonable subterfuges and excuses; yet they are, so far as I can see, the true criminals. All evil comes from them. That was the snare I had to escape.” The Privy Councillor struggled for an expression of his confused and painful feelings. It was all so different from anything he had expected. A human being spoke to him--a man. Words came to him to which he had to reconcile himself. They held the memory of recent and unhealed wounds that had been dealt him. Arguments refused to come to him. It was false and it was true. It depended on one’s attitude--on one’s measure of imagination and willingness to see, on one’s insight or fear, on one’s stubbornness or one’s courage to render an accounting to oneself. The ground which had long been swaying under his feet seemed suddenly to show huge cracks and fissures. The pride of his caste still tried in that last moment to raise barricades and search for weapons, but its power was spent. Without hope of a favourable answer, he asked: “And do not the bonds of blood exist for you any longer?” “When you stand before me and I see you, I feel that they exist,” was the answer. “When you speak and act, I feel them no longer.” “Can there be such a thing as an accounting between father and son?”