“Because it must be, nevertheless.  I have thought it over from every point of view.  We are not merely individuals, we belong to a whole, and have always to take the whole into consideration.  We are absolutely dependent.  If it were possible to live in solitude I could let it pass.  I should then bear the burden heaped upon me, though real happiness would be gone.  But so many people are forced to live without real happiness, and I should have to do it too, and I could.  We don’t need to be happy, least of all have we any claim on happiness, and it is not absolutely necessary to put out of existence the one who has taken our happiness away.  We can let him go, if we desire to live on apart from the world.  But in the social life of the world a certain something has been worked out that is now in force, and in accordance with the principles of which we have been accustomed to judge everybody, ourselves as well as others.  It would never do to run counter to it.  Society would despise us and in the end we should despise ourselves and, not being able to bear the strain, we should fire a bullet into our brains.  Pardon me for delivering such a discourse, which after all is only a repetition of what every man has said to himself a hundred times.  But who can say anything now?  Once more then, no hatred or anything of the kind, and I do not care to have blood on my hands for the sake of the happiness taken away from me.  But that social something, let us say, which tyrannizes us, takes no account of charm, or love, or limitation.  I have no choice.  I must.”

“I don’t know, Innstetten.”

Innstetten smiled.  “You shall decide yourself, Wuellersdorf.  It is now ten o ’clock.  Six hours ago, I will concede, I still had control of the situation, I could do the one thing or the other, there was still a way out.  Not so now; now I am in a blind alley.  You may say, I have nobody to blame but myself; I ought to have guarded and controlled myself better, ought to have hid it all in my own heart and fought it out there.  But it came upon me too suddenly, with too much force, and so I can hardly reproach myself for not having held my nerves in check more successfully.  I went to your room and wrote you a note and thereby lost the control of events.  From that very moment the secret of my unhappiness and, what is of greater moment, the smirch on my honor was half revealed to another, and after the first words we exchanged here it was wholly revealed.  Now, inasmuch as there is another who knows my secret, I can no longer turn back.”

“I don’t know,” repeated Wuellersdorf.  “I don’t like to resort to the old worn-out phrase, but still I can do no better than to say:  Innstetten, it will all rest in my bosom as in a grave.”