Fritz Nettenmair was obliged to despair of reestablishing his lost importance on the scene of the repairs.  Naturally he added also the result of his mistaken measures to Apollonius’ ever-growing account.  The feeling that he was superfluous seized him as it had his father, but not with quite the same effect.  What the little garden was to the old gentleman the slate-shed now became to the elder son; at least as long as he saw Apollonius on the hanging-seat or on the church roof.  But now he also brought the blue coat with him into the living room.  His children—­and this was easy as he himself did not trouble himself about them—­had also been won over by his brother, by reprehensible means, of course.  The reprehensible means were just those which he himself never applied:  unintentional kindness and love that was wise in its severity.  But even in his wife he began to see more and more one who was to some extent his brother’s ally in the latter’s conspiracy against him.  He saw this long before he had the slightest real cause to do so, and that was the shadow that his guilt threw across the future of his imagination.  Its old law was to compel him, by reason of the wrongness of his means of defense, to make of this shadow a real, living form and to place it in his life as a retributive force.

Vague, premonitory fear that fluttered by in momentary clear intervals, seemed to tell him that his changed behavior toward his wife must hasten this change.  At such times he suddenly became doubly pleasant and jovial with her; but even this joviality bore something of the nature of the sultry soil from which it grew.

One cure for such a disease is highly praised; that is diversion, self-forgetfulness.  As if the navigator should forget himself at sight of the threatening reef, as if every one should forget himself wherever double foresight is necessary!  Fritz Nettenmair took the cure.

From now on he was never missing at a ball or any public amusement; he felt himself to have fled the danger forever if he were absent only for an hour from the place where he saw it threatening.  He was more out of his house than in it—­and not he alone.  He thought the cure still more necessary for his wife than for himself.  His vengeful self-consciousness assumed what lay as a mere possibility in the future to be a reality of the present.  And his wife was still so much on his side that she was now angry with his brother to whose influence she attributed the change in her husband’s behavior—­only not in the way in which it really was responsible.

Apollonius, who was oppressed by all this as by a heavy cloud, an uncomprehended intuitive feeling, understood only this:  his brother and his sister-in-law avoided him.  He kept away from the places to which they went.  The inmost need of his nature, the tendency to gather together rather than to dissipate, in itself, would have led him to do so.  Solitude became a better cure for him than diversion proved to be for the other two.  He saw how different his sister-in-law was from what she had seemed to him to be before.  He was obliged to congratulate himself that his dearest hopes had not been fulfilled.  His work gave him enough sense of himself; whatever gaps remained the children filled.