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efforts were perhaps doomed in the end to be frustrated by these unfavourable conditions. But then, after he had been sitting gloomily over his books for a while, he would begin to have a strange feeling. True, his melancholy lost nothing of its oppressiveness-on the contrary, the sadness of it was still further intensified-but it no longer oppressed him. He would then feel more forlorn than ever, and as though defending a lost position; but in this mournfulness there lay a subtle relish, a pride in doing something utterly alien to the people about him, serving a divinity uncomprehended by the rest. And then it was that, fleetingly, something would flare up in his eyes that was like the ravishment of religious ecstasy.
    * * *
    Beineberg had talked himself to a standstill. In him the image of his eccentric father lived on in a kind of distorted magnification. Every feature was preserved; but what in the other had originally, perhaps, been no more than a mood that was conserved and intensified for the sake of its exclusiveness had in him grown hugely into a fantastic hope. That peculiarity of his father's, which for the older man was at bottom perhaps really no more than that last refuge for individuality which every human being-and even if it is only through his choice of clothes-must provide himself with in order to have something to distinguish him from others, had in him turned into the firm belief that he could achieve dominion over people by means of more than ordinary spiritual powers.
    Törless knew this talk by heart. It passed away over him, leaving him almost quite unmoved.
    He had now turned slightly from the window and was observing Beineberg, who was rolling himself a cigarette. And again lie felt the queer repugnance, the dislike of Beineberg, that would at times rise up in him. These slim, dark hands, which were now so deftly rolling the tobacco into the paper, were really-come to think of it-beautiful. Thin fingers, oval, beautifully curved nails: there was a touch of breeding, of elegance, about them. So there was too in the dark brown eyes. It was there also in the long-drawn lankiness of the whole body. To be sure, the ears did stick out more than would quite do, the face was small and irregular, and the sum total of the head's expression was reminiscent of a bat's. Nevertheless-Törless felt this quite clearly as he weighed the details against each other in the balance-it was not the ugly, it was precisely the more attractive features that made him so peculiarly uneasy.
    The thinness of the body-Beineberg was in the habit of lauding the steely, slender legs of Homeric champion runners as the ideal-did not at all have this effect on him. Törless had never yet tried to give himself an account of this, and for the moment he could not think of any satisfactory comparison. He would have liked to scrutinise Beineberg more closely, but then Beineberg would have noticed what he was thinking and he would have had to strike up some sort of conversation. Yet it was precisely thus-half looking at him, half filling the picture out in his imagination-that he was struck by the difference. If he thought the clothes away from the body, it became quite impossible to hold on to the notion of calm slenderness; what happened then, instantly, was that in his mind's eye he saw restless, writhing movements, a twisting of limbs and a bending of the spine such as are to be found in all pictures of martyrs' deaths, or in the grotesque performances of acrobats and 'rubber men' at fairs.
    And the hands, too, which he could certainly just as well have pictured in some beautifully expressive gesture, he could not imagine otherwise than in motion, with flickering fingers. And it was precisely on these hands, which were really Beineberg's most attractive feature, that his greatest repugnance was concentrated. There was something prurient about them. That no doubt, was, what it amounted to. And there was for him something prurient, too,