e the book case. "Yes, I am
suffering," he confessed reluctantly; "I am suffering." He walked along
the wall with dragging feet, and entered a room in which a light was
burning. He felt the same satiety and disgust at himself that he had
experienced a few moments earlier. This time it was caused by the sight
of the hand-carved furniture, the painted porcelain, the precious
tapestries, and the oil paintings in their gold frames.

He longed for simpler things; he longed for barren walls, a cot of
straw, parsimony, discipline. It was not the first time that his
exhausted organism had sought consolation in the thought of a monastic
life. This Protestant, this descendent of a long line of Protestants,
had long been tired of Protestantism. He regarded the Roman Church as
the more wholesome and merciful.

But the transformation of his religious views was his own carefully
guarded secret. And secret it had to remain until he, the undisciplined
son of his mother, could atone for his past misdeeds. He decided to wait
until this atonement had been effected. Just as a hypnotist gains
control of his medium by inner composure, so he thought he could hasten
the coming of this event by conceding it absolute supremacy over his
mind.

III

When Eberhard von Auffenberg left the paternal home to strike out for
himself, he was as helpless as a child that has lost the hand of its
adult companion in a crowd.

He put the question to himself: What am I going to do? He had never
worked. He had studied at various universities as so many other young
men have studied, that is, he had managed to pass a few examinations by
the skin of his teeth.

He had had so little to do in life, and was so utterly devoid of
ambition, that he looked upon a really ambitious individual as being
insane. Anything that was at all practical was filled with
insurmountable obstacles. His freedom, in other words, placed him in a
distressing state of mind and body.

It would not have been difficult for him to find people who would have
been willing to advance him money on his name. But he did not wish to
incur debts of which his father might hear. If he did, his solemn
solution of an unbearable relation would have amounted to nothing.

He could, of course, count on his share of the estate; and he did count
on it, notwithstanding the fact that to do so was to speculate on the
death of his own father. He stood in urgent need of a c