Christian continued his purely argumentative resistance. “Do you think it means anything to me or attracts me to know that you will give some discharged criminal, whose moral nature you think you have saved, one or two hundred marks to start life anew? That doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know those men. I don’t know how they look or act or talk or smell, or what they’ll do with the money, or whether it will really be of service to them. And since I don’t know that, the arrangement has no meaning to me.” Pastor Werner was taken aback. “To be sure,” he replied. “But I do know them, you see.” Christian smiled again. “We’re very differently constituted; we neither think nor act alike.” Suddenly he looked up. “But I’m not making these objections to create difficulties. Quite the contrary. You personally ask me for assistance and I personally render it. In return you do me the service of acting as my paymaster and showing me how to solve my problem. I hope you will have no reason to complain.” “Then you do consent and I may proceed to make definite arrangements?” the clergyman asked, half delighted and half doubtful still. Christian nodded. “Go ahead,” he said. “Make what arrangements seem best to you. It’s all too trivial to bother about.” “What do you mean by that exactly?” Werner asked, just as Eva had once, between laughter and amazement, asked his meaning. “A while ago you also said that what was really important was dragged down by these matters of money. What is the truly important thing to you?” “I can’t explain that to you. But I feel the triviality of all this. All I am doing is the merest beginning, and everyone overestimates it absurdly and makes a mountain of this molehill. I haven’t reached the real difficulty yet. And that will consist in earning back all one has given away--earning it back in another manner, and so, above all, that one does not feel one’s loss.” “Strange,” murmured the pastor. “It is strange. To hear you talk, one would think you were discussing a sporting event or a matter of barter.” Christian laughed. The pastor came up to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. His eyes were serious as he asked: “Where is the woman whom you ... have taken in?” Christian’s reply was a gesture in the direction of Karen’s flat. A thought that was strange and new seemed to flash into the clergyman’s mind. “Then you don’t live with her?” His voice sank to a whisper. “You are not living together?” “No,” Christian answered with a frown. “Certainly not.” The pastor’s arm dropped. There came a long silence. Then he spoke again: “Your father is stricken to the heart by a feeling as though several people whom he loves had succumbed to the same disease. He tries to hide his emotion, but he doesn’t succeed. Before he had any reason to be anxious about you, he once spoke to me of your sister Judith. He used the expression, ‘self-degradation.’ He described her as afflicted by a perverse impulse toward self-degradation.”