all men are nourished by their beliefs."

"And does not success content you?"

"Ah, but," asked Manuel slowly, just as he had once asked Horvendile in
Manuel's lost youth, "what is success? They tell me I have succeeded
marvelously in all things, rising from low beginnings, to become the
most lucky and the least scrupulous rogue alive: yet, hearing men's
applause, I sometimes wonder, for I know that a smaller-hearted creature
and a creature poorer in spirit is posturing in Count Manuel's high
cushioned places than used to go afield with the miller's pigs."

"Why, yes, Count Manuel, you have made endurable terms with this world
by succumbing to its foolishness: but do you take comfort, for that is
the one way open to anybody who has not rightly seen and judged the ends
of this world. At worst, you have had all your desires, and you have
made a very notable figure in Count Manuel's envied station."

"But I starve there, Hinzelmann, I dry away into stone, and this envied
living is reshaping me into a complacent idol for fools to honor, and
the approval of fools is converting the heart and wits of me into the
stony heart and wits of an idol. And I look back upon my breathless old
endeavors, and I wonder drearily, 'Was it for this?'"

"Yes," Hinzelmann said: and he shrugged, without ever putting off that
sad smile of his. "Yes, yes, all this is only another way of saying that
Beda has kept his word. But no man gets rid of Misery, Count Manuel,
except at a price."

They stayed silent for a while. Count Manuel stroked the round
straw-colored head of little Melicent. Hinzelmann played with the small
cross which hung at Hinzelmann's neck. This cross appeared to be woven
of plaited strings, but when Hinzelmann shook the cross it jingled like
a bell.

"Yet, none the less," says Hinzelmann, "here you remain. No, certainly,
I cannot understand you, Count Manuel. As a drunkard goes back to the
destroying cask, so do you continue to return to your fine home at
Storisende and to the incessant whispering of your father's father, for
all that you have but to remain in Suskind's low red-pillared palace to
be forever rid of that whisper and of this dreary satiating of human
desires."

"I shall of course make my permanent quarters there by and by," Count
Manuel said, "but not just yet. It would not be quite fair to my wife
for me to be leaving Storisende just now, when we are getting in the
crops, and when everything is more or le