That evening Dr. Kuhl was sitting in his laboratory, a vaulted apartment with barred windows, only one door communicating between it and his study. His mother, a widow of ample means, owned the house, and, after his father's death, he had fitted it up comfortably in his own way. His mother allowed him perfect liberty, she humoured all his whims and fancies, even when she did not approve of them and when they could not be brought into unison with social forms. To conduct an intrigue for her Paul, in perfect secrecy, gave her intense satisfaction, and it was not to be wondered at that her son, by means of these principles of education, attained such singularity that he was brought, more or less, into evil repute in every circle. There he sat now, amidst crucibles, retorts, bottles and tubes; here were covered utensils, heated over little lamps, there others stood open, so that he might watch the process of decomposition which the oxygen in the air calls forth in its contact with other gases. The Doctor had just blown into the blowpipe, and laid it aside. The blow-pipe, thought he to himself, plays a still greater part in the world than it does here in the laboratory. How many flames, which burned upwards to the sky, has it not blown back, until they crept away upon the ground! And in all ages the sycophants of a State, and the false teachers of mankind, have blown their ruinous breath upon nations through the blow-pipe of egotism. He went up to a retort and observed how in the process of heating two matters lost the unity of their elements, exchanged their constitutional parts with one another, so that, in consequence of this flow and dissolution, two other quite different combinations ensued. "Those fatal elective affinities," said he to himself, "what evil have they not caused in the world! How can one apply the laws of dead nature to the human heart? As if two were the decisive numbers for it; although, however, Hindoostan's gods already formed a triune Trimurti, as if, at the accession of a third, the one must fly this, the other that way, instead of remaining together in one beautiful league. What does it matter to us if chloride and lead, hydrogen and oxygen, seek and find one another, whether they meet as oxyde of lead and chlorate of hydrogen? How can any one wish to rule the human heart according to this freak of nature? Our great poets are the most dangerous enemies of freedom of the heart, and of a glorious love in common."