y, the first thing
the devil usually prescribes is a blonde Gretchen, or something like
her."

Miss Burns remained silent, and Frederick felt himself under the
necessity of continuing.

"I don't know whether it is of interest to you to learn something of the
remarkable adventures of a German scholar and ideologic bankrupt."

Miss Burns laughed and said:

"A bankrupt? No, I don't think you are a bankrupt. Of course, whatever
concerns you and whatever you wish to tell me is of interest to me."

"Very well," said Frederick, "we'll see whether you are right. Conceive
a man who, until he was thirty years old, was always going the wrong way,
or if not that, then, at least, the trips he took, no matter along what
way, always ended precipitately in a broken shaft or a fractured limb.
That I escaped the real catastrophe, the shipwreck, is really most
peculiar. Nevertheless, I think my ship has been wrecked and I with it,
or I and my ship are in the midst of foundering. For I see no land. I see
nothing solid or firm anywhere near me.

"I was kept in a military school until I was ten years old. The desire
came upon me to commit suicide, and I was punished for insubordination.
There was no fascination for me in being prepared for a great carnage.
So my father, though it meant that he had to give up his pet idea, took
me away from the school, and I went through the much-discussed humanistic
_Gymnasium_. My father is a passionate soldier. I became a physician, but
I had scientific interests outside of my profession, and I devoted myself
to bacteriology. Broken shafts and fractured limbs again. Good-bye to
medicine and bacteriology. It is scarcely likely that I shall ever work
in those fields again. I married. Beforehand, I had reared, as it were,
an artificial structure of the whole matter of marriage--a house, a
little garden, a wife and children, children whom I intended to educate
in a freer, better way than most people do. I practised in a poor country
district, being of the opinion that I could do more real good there than
in Berlin West. 'But, my dear boy,' everybody said, 'with your ancestral
name, your income in Berlin could be thirty or forty times larger.' And
my wife absolutely objected to having children. From the very moment she
knew a child was coming until its birth, there was one desperate scene
after the other. Life became a veritable hell to us. It was no rare thing
for us, instead of sleeping, to argue the wh