she was less pale than, and did not look
so old as, he.

CHAPTER XVII

Whenever Frida Laemke met Wolfgang Schlieben now, she cast down her eyes
and he pretended not to see her. He was angry with her: the confounded
little minx to betray him. She was the only one who could have put his
parents on his track. How should they otherwise have ever guessed it?
He could have kicked himself for having once given that viper hints
about his acquaintance in Puttkammerstrasse. Frida and her friendship,
just let her try to talk to him again about friendship. Pooh, women on
the whole were not worth anything.

A fierce contempt for women had taken possession of the young
fellow. He would have liked to spit in their faces--all venal
creatures--he knew quite enough about them now, ay, and loathed
them.

The boy, who was not yet nineteen, felt tired and old; strangely
tired. When Wolfgang thought of the time that had just passed, it
seemed to him like a dream; now that the rooms in Friedrichstrasse had
been given up and he was living with his parents again, even like a bad
dream. And when he met Frida Laemke--that could not be avoided as he
drove to and fro regularly in office hours now--he felt a bitter pang
every time. He did not even say how do you do to her, he could not
bring himself to say even that.

If only he could throw of! the oppression that weighed him down.
They were not unkind to him--no, they were even very good--but still he
had always the feeling that they only tolerated him. That irritated him
and made him sad at the same time. They had not reproached him, would
probably not do so either, but his father was always grave, reserved,
and his mother's glance had something that simply tortured him. He was
filled with a morbid distrust: why did they not tell him straight out
they despised him?

Something that was almost remorse troubled him during the nights
when he could not sleep. At such times his heart would throb,
positively flutter, he had to sit up in bed--he could not bear to lie
down--and fight for breath. Then he stared into the dark, his eyes
distended with terror. Oh, what a horrible condition that was. In the
morning when the attack was over--this "moral sickness"--as he used to
call it scornfully--he was vexed at his sentimentality. What wrong had
he done? Nothing different from what hundreds of other young fellows
do, only they were not so idiotic as he. That Frida, that confounded
gossip. He w