h.

"Is that true, Friedel?" he asked, apparently surprised.

"As true as possible. I think a timely love affair, however unlucky,
would have roused me and brought me to my senses again."

"General melancholy?"

"Oh, I was alone in the world. I had been reading, reading, reading; my
brain was one dark and misty muddle of Kant, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann,
and a few others. I read them one after another, as quickly as possible;
the mixture had the same effect upon my mind as the indiscriminate
contents of taffy-shop would have upon Sigmund's stomach--it made it
sick. In my crude, ungainly, unfinished fashion I turned over my
information, laying down big generalizations upon a foundation of
experience of the smallest possible dimensions, and all upon one side."

He nodded. "_Ei!_ I know it."

"And after considering the state of the human race--that is to say the
half dozen people I knew, and the miseries of the human lot as set forth
in the books I had read, and having proved to myself, all up in that
little room, you know"--I pointed to my bedroom--"that there neither was
nor could be heaven or hell or any future state, and having decided,
also from that room, that there was no place for me in the world, and
that I was very likely actually filling the place of some other man,
poorer than I was, and able to think life a good thing" (Eugen was
smiling to himself in great amusement), "I came to the conclusion that
the best thing I could do was to leave the world."

"Were you going to starve yourself to death? That is rather a tedious
process, _nicht wahr_?"

"Oh, no! I had not decided upon any means of effacing myself; and it was
really your arrival which brought on that fainting fit, for if you
hadn't turned up when you did I should probably have thought of my
interior some time before seven o'clock. But you came. Eugen, I wonder
what sent you up to my room just at that very time, on that very day!"

"Von Francius," said Eugen, tranquilly. "I had seen him, and he was very
busy and referred me to you--that's all."

"Well--let us call it von Francius."

"But what's the end of it? Is that the whole story?"

"I thought I might as well help you a bit," said I, rather awkwardly.
"You were not like other people, you see--it was the child, I think. I
was as much amazed as Karl, if I didn't show it so much, and after
that--"

"After that?"

"Well. There was the child, you see, and things seemed quite different
some