"Again, a spendthrift who had no means of his own always cautioned me to be frugal. He gave brilliant parties, but when he came to me he only got potatoes and herrings, and yet he thought that was beyond my means. On one occasion I had bought 200 grammes of nickel-sulphate for my chemical experiments. They cost fifty-two pence. The spendthrift came to visit me, looked at the sulphate, and exclaimed, 'Can you afford it? Nickel-sulphate which is so dear.' Fifty-two pence! Then he invited me to a drive in a carriage, and a meal which cost fifty-two kronas for an altogether unproductive purpose. When he had to pay the reckoning he suffered torments. Perhaps he was by nature a skinflint, who had yielded to a mania for extravagance and reacted against it. I tried to explain this once to him, as on principle I wished to think well of the man." =The Hate of Parasites.=--The teacher continued: "There are men who are spiritually so empty that they only live on others. I have an acquaintance (when one is over fifty one does not ask for friends any more) who constantly visits me but never says anything. Our social intercourse consists in my speaking alone. When he leaves me after several hours, I feel as if I had been undergoing blood-letting. It is certainly good to be able to talk oneself out often, but one would often like to have an answer to one's questions; but I never get an answer, not even to a question in his own special line. I can only remember one expression which this man used, and that was extraordinarily stupid. Somebody had slandered me, and my 'acquaintance' had believed every word and painted my figure in false colours. Finally one evening I defended myself, and proved that my slanderer was not in his right senses. He rejected my explanation, exclaiming 'Fie! how cynical you are!' "What did this answer mean? First, that I must not wash myself clean, for he wanted to have me dirty; secondly, that he gave me the lie; thirdly, that his sympathies were on the side of the slanderer. I draw the inference that this man hated me, and therefore visited me. If he could not have intercourse with me, he could not abuse my confidence and gratify his hate. His tactics were--to live my life, to devour my soul, to gnaw my bones. The attraction he felt to me he called sympathy, though it was antipathy. There are many kinds of hate, and a wife's 'love' to her husband is a variety of hate. She desires his virile power in order to become a husband and make him into a passive-wife."