For although the young man did not know it, a probing mind inside the private door of the director’s office was assessing his suitability for higher things, and while the ambitious assistant thought he was merely mastering his daily work in a mood of furious energy, his almost invisible employer had him marked out for a great future. For some years now the ageing Councillor, who was often kept at home and sometimes even in bed by his very painful sciatica, had been looking for a totally reliable and intellectually well-qualified private secretary, a man to whom he could turn for discussion of the firm’s most confidential patents, as well as those experiments that had to be made with all the requisite discretion. And at last he seemed to have found him. One day he put an unexpected proposition to the startled young man: how would he like to give up the furnished room he rented in the suburbs, and take up residence in Councillor G’s spacious villa, where he would be closer to hand for his employer? The young man was surprised by this proposition, coming as it did out of the blue, but the Councillor was even more surprised when, after a day spent thinking it over, the young man firmly declined the honour of his employer’s offer, rather clumsily hiding his outright refusal behind thin excuses. Eminent scientist as the Councillor was in his own field, he did not have enough psychological experience to guess the true reason for this refusal, and the defiant young man may not even have acknowledged it to himself. It was, in fact, a kind of perverted pride, the painful sense of shame left by a childhood spent in dire poverty. Coming to adulthood as a private tutor in the distastefully ostentatious houses of the nouveaux riches, feeling that he was a nameless hybrid being somewhere between a servant and a companion, part and yet not part of the household, an ornamental item like the magnolias on the table, placed there and then cleared away again as required, he found himself brimming over with hatred for his employers and the sphere in which they lived, the heavy, ponderous furniture, the lavishly decorated rooms, the over-rich meals, all the wealth that he shared only on sufferance. He had gone through much in those houses: the hurtful remarks of impertinent children; the even more hurtful pity of the lady of the house when she handed him a few banknotes at the end of the month; the ironic, mocking looks of the maids, who were always ready to be cruel to the upper servants, when he moved into a new house with his plain wooden trunk and had to hang his only suit and put away his grey, darned underwear, that infallible sign of poverty, in a wardrobe that was not his own. No, never again, he had sworn to himself, he would never live in a strange house again, never go back to riches until they belonged to him, never again let his neediness show, or allow presents tactlessly given to hurt his feelings. Never, never again. Outwardly his title of Doctor, cheap but impenetrable armour, made up for his low social status, and at the office his fine achievements disguised the still sore and festering wounds of his youth, when he had felt ashamed of his poverty and of taking charity. So no, he was not going to sell the handful of freedom he now had, his jealously guarded privacy, not for any sum of money. And he declined the flattering invitation, even at the risk of wrecking his career, with excuses and evasions.

Soon, however, unforeseen circumstances left him no choice. The Councillor’s state of health deteriorated so much that he had to spend a long time bedridden, and could not even keep in touch with his office by telephone. The presence of a private secretary now became an urgent necessity and finally, if the young man did not want to lose his job, he could no longer resist his employer’s repeated and pressing requests. God knows, he thought, the move to the villa had been difficult for him; he still clearly remembered the day when he first rang the bell of the grand house, which was rather in the old Franconian style, in the Bockenheimer Landstrasse The evening before, so that his poverty would not be too obvious, he had hastily bought new underwear, a reasonably good black suit and new shoes, spending his savings on them—and those savings were meagre, for on his salary, which was not high, he was also keeping an old mother and two sisters in a remote provincial town. And this time a hired man delivered the ugly trunk containing his earthly goods ahead of him—the trunk that he hated because of all the memories it brought back. All the same, discomfort rose like some thick obstruction in his throat when a white-gloved servant formally opened the door to him, and even in the front hall he met with the satiated, self-satisfied atmosphere of wealth. Deep-piled carpets that softly swallowed up his footsteps were waiting, tapestries hung on the walls even in the hall, demanding solemn study, there were carved wooden doors with heavy bronze handles, clearly not intended to be touched by a visitor’s own hand but opened by a respectfully bowing servant. In his defiantly bitter mood, he found all this oppressive. It was both heady and unwelcome. And when the servant showed him into the guest-room with its three windows, the place intended as his permanent residence, his sense of being an intruder who was out of place here gained the upper hand. Yesterday he had been living in a draughty little fourth-floor back room, with a wooden bedstead and a tin basin to wash in, and now he was supposed to make himself at home here, where every item of the furnishings seemed boldly opulent, aware of its monetary value, and looked back at him with scorn as a man who was merely tolerated here. All he had brought with him, even he himself in his own clothes, shrank to miserable proportions in this spacious, well-lit room. His one coat, ridiculously occupying the big, wide wardrobe, looked like a hanged man; his few washing things and his shabby shaving kit lay on the roomy, marble-tiled wash-stand like something he had coughed up or a tool carelessly left there by a workman; and instinctively he threw a shawl over the hard, ugly wooden trunk, envying it for its ability to lie in hiding here, while he himself stood inside these four walls like a burglar caught in the act. In vain he tried to counter his ashamed, angry sense of being nothing by reminding himself that he had been specifically asked for, pressingly invited to come. But the comfortable solidity of the items around him kept demolishing his arguments. He felt small again, insignificant, of no account in the face of this ostentatious, magnificent world of money, servants, flunkeys and other hangers-on, human furniture that had been bought and could be lent out. It was as if his own nature had been stolen from him. And now, when the servant tapped lightly at the door and appeared, his face frozen and his bearing stiff, to announce that the lady of the house had sent to ask if the doctor would call on her, he felt, as he hesitantly followed the man through the suite of rooms, that for the first time in years his stature was shrinking, his shoulders already stooping into an obsequious bow, and after a gap of years the uncertainty and confusion he had known as a boy revived in him.

However, no sooner had he approached her for the first time than he felt an agreeable sensation as his inner tension relaxed, and even before, as he straightened his back after bowing to her, his eyes took in the face and figure of the woman speaking to him, her words had come irresistibly to his ears.