e him to take some food, by ordering dinner for himself. Bruno
felt obliged to sit down with him, and, at every mouthful, he said: "I
can't eat." At last, however, he ordered some champagne.

"I must build a fire in my engine!" said he, gnashing his teeth, while
he thrust the bottle into the wine-cooler. "I derive as little pleasure
from this as the engine does from the coals."

He drank down the wine hastily, and went on eating with a woe-begone
expression, as if he would, at any moment, burst into tears.

He ordered more champagne.

"Did you see that?" said he, looking out of the window. His eyes were
inflamed. "There's Kreuter, the merchant, riding Count Klettenheim's
chestnut gelding. They must have played high last night, that the count
should give up his horse; why, it's the pride of his life, his honor.
What is Klettenheim without his gelding. A mere cipher, a double zero.
Ah, my dear friend, excuse me! I am feverish, I am ill. But I won't be
ill! I shall say nothing more. Go on; say whatever you please."

The intendant had nothing to say. He felt as ill-at-ease as if he were
shut up in a dungeon with a maniac.

"I wish to speak with lackey Baum," cried Bruno suddenly. The intendant
was obliged to dispatch a telegram to the summer palace, asking that
Baum should be sent to the king's aid-de-camp.

Bruno let down the curtains, ordered lights and more wine, and gave
orders that no one should be admitted. The intendant was in despair,
but Bruno exclaimed:

"My dear friend, everything on earth is suicide, with this difference,
however--here, one can always come to life again. The hour one kills is
the only one that is rightly spent."

The intendant feared an outbreak of delirium, but Bruno was not one of
those cavaliers who have only as much mind as the champagne they have
just tossed down inspires them with, and who, at best, can only write a
gallant billet-doux or devise a witty impropriety. At other times,
Bruno would have laughed at the man who would ask him to adopt a system
as his own, and yet he now asserted that he had one, and, filling his
glass again, exclaimed: "Yes, my friend; there are only two kinds of
human beings in the world."

"Men and women?" said the intendant, who thought it best to fall in
with his vein, in order more easily to divert him from it.

"Pshaw!" interrupted Bruno. "Who is speaking of such things? Listen, my
friend; the two human species are those who enjoy and those who s