was more
out of his house than in it--and not he alone. He thought the cure
still more necessary for his wife than for himself. His vengeful
self-consciousness assumed what lay as a mere possibility in the
future to be a reality of the present. And his wife was still so much
on his side that she was now angry with his brother to whose influence
she attributed the change in her husband's behavior--only not in the
way in which it really was responsible.

Apollonius, who was oppressed by all this as by a heavy cloud, an
uncomprehended intuitive feeling, understood only this: his brother
and his sister-in-law avoided him. He kept away from the places to
which they went. The inmost need of his nature, the tendency to gather
together rather than to dissipate, in itself, would have led him to do
so. Solitude became a better cure for him than diversion proved to be
for the other two. He saw how different his sister-in-law was from
what she had seemed to him to be before. He was obliged to
congratulate himself that his dearest hopes had not been fulfilled.
His work gave him enough sense of himself; whatever gaps remained the
children filled.

And the old man in the blue coat? Has he in his blindness no suspicion
of the clouds that are piling up all about his house? Or is it such a
suspicion that grips him at times when, meeting Apollonius, he
exchanges indifferent words with him? Then two powers strive on his
brow which his son, confronted by the shield over his father's eyes,
does not see. He wants to ask something but he does not ask. So thick
is the cloud that the old man has spun about him like a cocoon that
there is no longer any way through it from him out into the world nor
any, leading from outside in to him. He behaves as if he knew about
everything. If he did not do so, he would show the world his
helplessness and himself challenge it to abuse this helplessness. And
if he should ask would people tell him the truth? No! He believes the
world to be as obdurate toward him as he is toward it. He does not
ask. He listens where he knows he is not seen listening, straining
feverishly to catch every sound. And in every sound he hears something
that is not there; his strained imagination builds boulders of it that
crush his breast, but he does not ask. He dreams of nothing but of
things that bring disgrace on him and his house.

It is the nature of guilt that it entangles not alone its author in
new guilt. It has the magic