MORITZ--No, thanks--I won’t smoke.--If only it can keep on like this! I mean to work and work till my eyes pop out of my head. Ernest Roebel has fallen down six times already since vacation--three times in Greek, twice with Knochenbruch, last time in History of Literature. I haven’t been in that pitiful fix more than five times, and from to-day on it shall never happen again!--Roebel won’t shoot himself. Roebel hasn’t got parents who are sacrificing their all for him. Whenever he wants to, he can be a soldier of fortune or a cowboy or a sailor. But if _I_ fail my father’ll have a stroke and Mama’ll go crazy. That’s the kind of thing nobody would live to see. Before the exam I prayed God to let me get consumption, so that the cup might pass me by untasted. It did pass over--even tho its nimbus still gleams at me from afar so that I never dare to lift my eyes.--But now that I’ve got hold of the first rung I shall haul myself up. I’m sure of that, because the inevitable consequence of a fall will be a broken neck. MELCHIOR--There’s an undreamed-of meanness to this life. It wouldn’t take much to make me hang myself up in the branches.--Wonder where Mama can be with the tea. MORITZ--Your tea will do me good, Melchior.--I’m actually trembling! I feel so strangely sensitized. Touch me a moment. I see, I hear, I feel much more sharply, and yet everything’s so dreamy, so charged with atmosphere.--How the garden recedes in the moonlight there, so still, so deep, as if it went on forever! Dim-veiled figures are moving among the bushes; they slip over the open tracts in breathless activity, and vanish in the half-dark. I should say they were holding a conference under the chestnut-tree.--Shan’t we go down, Melchior? MELCHIOR--Let’s wait till we’ve had some tea.