gone, after they all had gone, he sat thinking about it and he had laughed terribly, loudly, and then trembled and wept and Mizzi on the other side of the landing knew nothing about it, no one knew, no one must ever know just _that_. Yes, he was going very fast. He knew it himself; knew that he was headed for the madhouse, as straight even as towards death. Some day he'd do something of a sort that nobody had any right to do. Often he would awake, icy cold, at the fear of what he might do. He couldn't imagine at all what it would be, but something that people who were dwelling freely among their fellowmen were not allowed to do--and rightly.... Sometimes his thoughts would turn with nostalgic longing to the gay, full years of his student-life; those busy years as intern at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The luck he'd had when old Professor Schulrath but a year before his death, had taken him as assistant.... The eager beginnings of his own private practice; that unforgettable thrill the first time he had seen his shingle hanging outside his own door.... Pride bound up with a hot intention to conquer misery, pain, death even. Soon he had found himself fully launched on the tide of an ever-swelling general practice. Then one Sunday at Pauli's he had met Mizzi,--full-bosomed, soft-voiced Mizzi, underneath as hard as a rock, as cruel as the grave, crueller than the grave.... That whole first year of the war he had been among those detailed for general duty in the great city. Afterwards, the civilian population was left to be born or die as best it could. Every available physician was rushed to the front. The mortality among the wounded had become too great. Poor fellows sent back from one or the other fronts would sometimes have been two or three weeks in their uniforms, still in their first-aid bandages, or not bandaged at all; and when they got to Vienna after the torture of their transport in springless luggage-vans, there was often little to be done for them except bury them in those great mounds that grew and grew as the hospitals eased themselves of their dead. It had to be managed less wastefully. Lives were to be saved that they might be thrown again into the struggle....