that he lacked this and that his brother possessed it.  He had agreed in his own mind that his brother had used means which he was pleased to feel himself too noble to apply.  In that way Apollonius had won the people away from him.  The latter had no suspicion of what was going on in his brother’s breast; he was on his guard against him, as one must be against cunning persons, for such enemies can only be defeated with their own weapons.  The brotherly friendliness and respect with which Apollonius treated him was a mask behind which he thought he could certainly hide his sinister plans; he would pay him back and make him more easily harmless if he hid his watchfulness behind the same mask.  Apollonius’ good-natured willingness outwardly to subordinate himself to him appeared to his brother like derision in which the workmen, won over by the deceitful one, knowingly took part.  In his sensitiveness, he himself resorted to the means that he assumed his brother employed.  He was prevented from opposing him openly by the fact that Apollonius impressed him himself, even though he would not have acknowledged this to be the reason.  He laid the blue coat of thunder aside and descended to the very lowest rung of his joviality.  He began by hints and then gradually by words to show his sympathy with the workmen who groaned beneath the tyranny of a time-serving intruder, as he proved to them; as he had not the courage to incite them to open rebellion he sought to lead them to commit single petty acts of mutiny.  He began to treat them to food and drink daily.  They ate and drank, but remained as before in the course that Apollonius marked out for them.

The common man has a child’s keen eye for the strong points and weaknesses of his superior.  This endeavor, which they saw through, lost Fritz Nettenmair the last vestige of the men’s respect; it taught them, if they did not already know it, in whose bad books they might safely come, in whose they might not.  And if they had been uncertain, the inspector’s different behavior toward the two brothers might have determined them.  And as they were not so finely organized, and also had not the same reasons as Fritz Nettenmair, their opinion made itself undisguisedly plain.  They took liberties with him which showed him that the success of his condescension was entirely different from what he had intended.  Then he drew the cloud of the blue coat once more wrathfully about him, whistled more shrilly than ever, so that the big bell on the other side resounded, was doubly bombastic and raised his shoulders as high again toward his black head.  The wrath and decision of his former coughing and spitting was child’s play to those he displayed now.  But the workmen soon knew that this went on only in Apollonius’ absence; and his chance appearance, like the rising full moon, disconcerted the heaviest thunder-storms.