shun them, we start to despise and hate them, and no longer want to see them. And then we do see them, and we fall prey to a terrible agitation that we can’t control. All the other people I met at the funeral in Kilb meant virtually nothing to me, I now thought, even the Auersbergers, but meeting Jeannie instantly plunged me into mental turmoil. I had thought of them all on the way to Kilb, all except Jeannie, and naturally I had not considered the dreadful possibility of meeting her again. But there she was. She even shook hands with me at the cemetery — she even managed to smile at me, I recalled, but it was an almost annihilating smile. Yet perhaps I returned it with an equally annihilating smile. I hated her as she stood by the open grave, acting the part of the lifelong friend, I now thought, going closer to the grave than anyone else, taking a handful of earth from the sexton’s shovel and throwing it into the grave with a dexterous movement of the hand. I must stop going to her apartment before she kills me, I had thought almost thirty years ago, and I had simply made good my escape, one might say. My behavior was not as despicable as might be thought: I acted in self-defense, fearful for my own survival, I now told myself, providing myself with an excuse that I could not expect anyone else to provide and did not demand from anyone. We meet someone at the right moment, I thought, we take everything we need from them, and then we leave them, again at the right moment. I met Jeannie Billroth at just the right moment and left her at the right moment — just as I’ve always left everybody at the right moment, it now occurred to me. We adapt ourselves to the mentality and temperament of a person like Jeannie, and for a time we take in only what this person’s mentality and temperament have to offer us, and when we think we’ve taken in enough — when we’ve had enough — we simply sever the connection, just as I severed my connection with Jeannie. We spend years sucking all we can out of someone, and then, having almost sucked them dry, we suddenly say that we ourselves are being sucked dry. And for the rest of our lives we have to live with the knowledge of our own baseness, I now reflected. And having parted from Jeannie, I changed sides and went over to the Auersbergers with colors flying, as it were — and to Joana. I had broken with Jeannie, to whom I owed almost everything at that time — simply deserting her for the Auersbergers and Joana, attaching myself for two or three years first to the Auersbergers, by whom I was immediately fascinated, and then to Joana. For the fact is that the moment I deserted the Auersbergers, the moment I escaped from them, one might say, I flung myself at Joana; having given up the Gentzgasse and Maria Zaal, at first inwardly and then outwardly, I opted for the Sebastiansplatz. After Jeannie had initiated me into the literature of the twentieth century and the Auersbergers had enabled me to widen my knowledge to an unbelievable extent — when suddenly the art of literature, especially twentieth-century literature, was no longer a mystery to me, thanks to Jeannie and the Auersbergers, I fell upon the so-called plastic arts;from now on all my interest was directed to these and to acting—and of course to the artof movement, to dance, and to choreography, since it was only here that Joana was truly in her element. Looking back, I now thought as I sat facing Jeannie, I chose what was for me an ideal course of development. I chose this development, I thought — I did not think: I underwent this development, which proved to be absolutely ideal — I thought: I chose this ideal development for myself, I chose what was for me the ideal artistic development. This idea gave me pleasure — above all, I think, because all at once the notion of artistic development seemed self-evident. There could have been no more ideal, no more logical development for me, I now thought — encountering first Jeannie Billroth the writer, then the Auersbergers, and finally Joana — and through Jeannie her chemical friend Ernstl, and through Joana her tapestry artist Fritz; I could not have made a happier choice. Yet now I hated Jeannie, who was sitting opposite me, and she hated me. This hatred would of course be susceptible of precise analysis, but I have no wish to analyze it, though possibly Jeannie made her own analysis long ago. And a person like this ends up writing worthless sentimental prose, and poems that are equally worthless and sentimental, and finally falls into the universal cesspit of petit bourgeois mediocrity, I thought. We respect somebody — we may respect them for years — and then suddenly come to hate them, without at first knowing why. And we find it quite intolerable that this person, whom for so long we respected and perhaps even loved, who as it were opened our eyes and ears to everything, who revealed the whole world to us, and above all the world of art — that a person like this, who for so many years preached the highest standards, supreme standards, who guided and educated us to these supreme standards, should have ended up producing such miserable art and cultivating such appalling dilettantism. We simply cannot understand how such a person can eventually have produced something worthless and repellent, I now thought, and we can’t forgive them because, by merely pretending to subscribe to these supreme standards, they have cheated and deceived us. Jeannie cheated and deceived you with her own dilettantism, I told myself as I watched her sitting there, filled with hatred and revulsion and having to endure the actor’s endless anecdotes. Like all the others, he was leaning back in his chair, no doubt expecting that the Auersbergers would shortly ask the by-now stiff and lifeless company around the dinner table to get up and repair to the music room. I find nothing more distasteful than listening to the Viennese recounting their anecdotes, and I have to endure this Viennese perversion too, I thought. The Auersbergers’ dining room suddenly reminded me of a chapel of rest, largely no doubt because they had meanwhile switched off all the electric lights, so that the room was now lit only by the candles in the Empire lamps on the dining table. One could now see only the contours of the furniture in the dining room; one could no longer see the perverse beauty of the room — which I used to think altogether too beautiful — but only its somber theatricality. This atmosphere was in tune with the present company, who were waiting for a signal from the hosts that they might leave the dining room and move to the greater comfort of the music room. They seemed to have been plunged into a mood of despondency, above all by Joana’s death, but also by the lateness of the hour, I thought, and not even the actor was disposed to go on talking. He loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt, murmuring something about fresh air, whereupon the hostess jumped up to open a window. She opened the window overlooking the courtyard, rather than the one that gave onto the street, expecting the air to be fresher from that quarter. After this she went out into the music room, then returned to the dining room and sat down again at the table. She could have believed anything of Joana, she said, resuming her place at the table, but not that she would kill herself. The actor again brought up the case of his colleague who went to Munich, whom he described as