“I don’t understand anything. What’s the matter at your office?”
“Nothing . . . a stupid affair. It’s all the same to me now, what was there and what will be there. Do you think that it makes me unhappy?”
“Then what is upsetting you?”
“It’s nothing. It’s quite unimportant in any case. I don’t think about it at all. On the contrary. I’m very happy . . . very happy, Vojtech.” He turned to his brother confidentially: “I beg of you, tell me the truth, but frankly. Do you think that I’m fit to be an official? What do you think?”
“I . . . I . . . I don’t know,” stammered Vojtech.
“I only want to say, you see, that if you know me a little from old times, would you think that it is sufficient for me? That I could be satisfied with it? Or perhaps I haven’t the right or the need to live otherwise. Do you think it’s true?“
“I don’t think so at all,” said Vojtech, unwillingly and without certainty, trying, at a glance, to catch the whole, regular, clearly limited life of his brother; the life which he had sometimes grudged him, the life in which he had never had close interest.
“Perhaps, we can say, it was so,” Karel continued, reflecting. “Or it was sleeping in me. Do you know, I have not even known it myself, but now, Vojtech, I know it only too well.”
“What do you know so well?”'
“And all for what,” Karel waved his hand in the air, absorbed in his own thoughts.
Vojtech hesitated for a moment.
“Listen, Karel,” he began, “something has happened to you. You are angry or you are upset and . . . and perhaps without reason. Tell me first, what has happened to you. Perhaps it might be put right. Surely we can do something about it. And that you will not return to your wife or to your office is all nonsense. You are not seriously thinking of it . . . are you?”
Karel stood up and laughed.
“That’s enough,” he said, and began to walk up and down the room. Then he looked round, stood before the pictures, and recognized all the permanent things. . . . “Vojtech, poor man,” he began mockingly, “so you live here? And alone? And have you enough room for your whole life, your whole life? Look here,
