hough you see him daily." And the hateful and
pitiful thing was that this soft and slightly malicious voice had the
right of it, that time went on and days came when Tonio Kroeger was no
longer so unconditionally ready to die for the merry Inga as formerly,
because he felt in himself the desire and the ability to accomplish in
his fashion a quantity of remarkable things in the world.

And he cautiously circled about the altar of sacrifice on which the
pure and chaste flame of his love was blazing, knelt before it, and
stirred and fed it in every way, because he wanted to be faithful. Yet
after a time, imperceptibly, without sensation or noise, it went out
nevertheless.

But Tonio Kroeger stood yet awhile before the chilled altar, full of
wonder and disappointment to find that faithfulness was impossible on
earth. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went his way.

III

He went the way he had to go, a little carelessly and unevenly,
whistling to himself, looking into space with head on one side; and if
he went astray, that was because there simply is no right path for some
individuals. If you asked him what in all the world he intended to be,
he would supply varying information, for he was wont to say (and had
already written it down) that he had in him the possibilities of a
thousand forms of existence, together with the secret consciousness
that they really were one and all impossibilities.

Even before he departed from his cramped native city, the clamps and
threads with which it held him had gently loosened their hold. The old
family of the Kroegers had little by little begun to crumble and
disintegrate, and men had reason to reckon Tonio Kroeger's own existence
and nature among the other features of that process. His father's
mother had died, the head of the family, and not long afterward his
father, the tall, meditative, carefully dressed gentleman with the wild
flower in his buttonhole, had followed her in death. The big Kroeger
house together with its honorable history was for sale, and the firm
went out of business. Tonio's mother, however, his beautiful,
passionate mother, who played the piano and the mandolin so
wonderfully, and to whom everything was quite immaterial, married anew
after the lapse of a year, this time a musician, a virtuoso with an
Italian name whom she followed to far-away lands. Tonio Kroeger found
this a trifle unprincipled; but was _he_ called upon to pr