m the most secret chambers of his heart. He
was terrified at the voluptuousness revealed to him by the unveiling of
the mystery of his soul. They are human beings after all, those members
of the nobility, he exclaimed with a feeling of personal triumph. They
throw themselves away; they meet some slippery imp, and fall; they lose
control of themselves as soon as they hear a skirt rustle.

But what concerned the Baron in this case concerned also Herr Carovius.
A passion that had taken possession of the Baron had to be guarded,
studied, and eventually shared by Herr Carovius himself.

Herr Carovius's loneliness had gradually robbed him of his equanimity.
Suppressed impulses were stifling his mind with the luxuriant growths of
a vivid and vicious imagination. The adventures into which he had
voluntarily plunged in order to make sure of his control over Eberhard
had almost ruined him. The net he had spread for the helplessly
fluttering bird now held him himself entangled in its meshes. The world
to him was a body full of wounds on which he was battening his Neronic
lusts. But it was at the same time a tapestry, with bright coloured
pictures which could be made living and real by a magic formula, and
this formula he had not yet been able to discover.

At the insinuations of the apothecary his fancy took on new life: he
was not a man in whose soul old emotions died out; his lusts never
became extinct. Lying on the sofa, taking his midday siesta, he would
picture the figure of Eleanore dancing around him in diminutive form.
When he sat at the piano and played an _etude_, he imagined he saw
Daniel standing beside him criticising his technique--and doing it with
much show of arrogance. When he went out of evenings, he saw Nothafft
displayed on all the signs, while every _demi-monde_ bore Eleanore's
features.

It seemed to him in time that Eleanore Jordan was his property; that he
had a right to her. His life, he felt, was full of lamentable
privations: other people had everything, he had nothing. Others
committed crimes; all he could do was to make note of the crimes. And no
man could become either satiated or rich from merely taking the criminal
incidents of other people's lives into account.

At midnight he put on his sleeping gown, took a seat before the mirror,
and read until break of day a novel in which a man fifty years old has a
secret and successful love affair with a young woman. As he read this
novel he knew that