r, after making one good resolution on top of another,
he had, when the time came, again been a willing defaulter. He had
allowed the chance to slip of making good, by redoubled diligence, his
foolish mistake with regard to Schwarz. Now it was too late; though the
master had let him have his way in the choice of piece for the coming
PRUFUNG, it had mainly been owing to indifference. If only he did not
prove unequal to the choice now it was made! For that he was out of the
rut of steady work, was clear to him as soon as he put his hands to the
piano.

But he had never been so forlornly energetic as on this particular
afternoon. Yet there was something mechanical, too, about his playing;
neither heart nor brain was in it. Mendelssohn's effective roulades ran
thoughtlessly from his fingers: in the course of a single day, he had
come to feel a deep contempt for the emptiness of these runs and
flourishes. He pressed forward, however, hour after hour without a
break, as though he were a machine wound up for the purpose. But with
the entrance of dusk, his fictitious energy collapsed. He did not even
trouble to light the lamp, but, throwing himself on the sofa, covered
his eyes with his arm.

The twilight induced sensations like itself--vague, formless,
intolerable. A sudden recognition of the uselessness of human striving
grew up in him, with the rapidity of a fungus. Effort and work,
ambition and success, alike led nowhere, were so many blind alleys:
ambition ended in smoke; success was a fleeing phantom, which one
sought in vain to grasp. To the great mass of mankind, it was more than
immaterial whether one of its units toiled or no; not a single soul was
benefited by it. Most certainly not the toiler himself. It was only
given to a few to achieve anything; the rest might stand aside early in
the day. Nothing of their labours would remain, except the scars they
themselves bore.

He was unhappy; to-night he knew it with a painful clearness. The shock
had been too rude. For him, change had to be prepared, to come
gradually. Sooner or later, no doubt, he would right himself again; but
in the meantime his plight was a sorry one. It was his duty to protect
himself against another onslaught of the kind--to protect them both.
For there was no blinking the fact: a few more weeks like the
foregoing, and they would have been two of the wretchedest creatures on
earth. They were miserable enough as it was, he in his, she in her own