"What do you mean, brother?" asked Andreas Döderlein, his head bowed in grief.
"What are you trying to do? Are you trying to teach me something about this poisoner of wells?" shouted Herr Carovius, and his face took on the enraged expression of a hunchback who has just been taunted about his deformity. "Does the professor imagine that he knows better than I do who this Richard Wagner is, this comedian, this Jew who goes about masked as the Germanic Messiah, this cacaphonist, this bungler, botcher, and bully, this court sycophant, this Pulchinello who pokes fun at the whole German Empire and the rest of Europe led about by the nose, this Richard Wagner? Very well, if you have anything to teach me about him, go on! Proceed! I am listening. Go on! Pluck up your courage." With this he leaned back in his chair, and laughed a laughter punctuated with asthmatic sighs, his hands in the meantime resting folded across his stomach.
Andreas Döderlein rose to his full stature, see-sawed a bit on the tips of his toes, and looked down on Herr Carovius as one might look down upon a flea that one had caught and was just in the act of crushing between two finger nails. "Oh, ho," he said, "how interesting! Upon my word, brother Carovius, you are an interesting individual. But if some one were to offer me all the money in the world, I should not like to be so ... interesting. Not I. And you, Marguerite, would you like to be so interesting?"
There was something distinctly annihilating in this air of superiority. It had its full effect on Herr Carovius: his unleashed laughter was immediately converted into a gurgling titter. He opened his eyes wide and rolled them behind his nose-glasses, thus making himself look like a water-spitting figure on a civic fountain. Marguerite, however, timid as she was, never saying a word without making herself smaller by hiding her hands, glanced in helpless fashion from her brother to her husband, and dropped her head before them.
Was the feeling of Herr Carovius for Andreas Döderlein one of hatred? It was hatred and more. It was a feeling of venomous embitterment with which he thought of him, his name, his wife, his child, the thick, bulky wedding ring on his finger, and the gelatinous mass of flesh on his neck. From that evening on he never again visited his sister. If Marguerite got up enough courage to visit him, he treated her with crabbed contempt. She finally came to the point where she would pass his door with not a thought of entering it.