... and occasionally a white garment glitters ... and I'd like to get
in and I can't. That's life, you see. And I've got to stand
miserably outside?"

"Well, you don't impress me as such a miserable creature?"

"No, no, in a way, not. On the coarser side, so to speak, I have a
good deal of fun. Out there around _Philippstrasse_ and
_Marienstrasse_ there are women enough--stylish and fine-looking and
everything you want. And my friends are great fellows, too. Every one
can stand his fifteen glasses ... I suppose I am an ass, and perhaps
it's only moral _katzenjammer_ on account of this past week. But when
I walk the streets and see the tall, distinguished houses and think of
all those people and their lives, yonder a millionaire, here a
minister of state, and think that, once upon a time, they were all
crude boys like myself--well, then I have the feeling as if I'd never
attain anything, but always remain what I am."

"Well, my dear Fritz, the only remedy for that lies in that 'book-worm
business' as you call it. Sit down on your breeches and work!"

"No, Herr von Niebeldingk, it isn't that either ... let me tell you.
Day before yesterday I was at the opera.... They sang the
_Goetterddmmerung_.... You know, of course. There is _Siegfried_, a
fellow like myself, ... not more than twenty ... I sat upstairs in the
third row with two seamstresses. I'd picked them up in the
_Chausseestrasse_--cute little beasts, too.... But when _Brunhilde_
stretched out her wonderful, white arms to him and sang: 'On to new
deeds, O hero!' why I felt like taking the two girls by the scruff of
the neck and pitching them down into the pit, I was so ashamed.