It was late when we made a halt before a garden by the river.

“We live here,” said Demian. “Come and see us soon! We shall expect you.”

I cheerfully wended my long way home through the night, which had become cold. Here and there brawling students were lurching through the town. I had often felt, sometimes with a feeling of privation, sometimes with scorn, the contrast between their curious sort of gaiety and my lonely life. But now, tranquil and strong in a sense of secret power I felt as never before how little that affected me, how far removed was their world from mine. I reminded myself of officials of my native town, worthy old gentlemen, who clung to memories of the semesters they had passed in drinking, as they would to memories of a blissful paradise, and who practised a cult, calling up reminiscences of the vanished “freedom” of their University life with all the seriousness which some poet or other romantic would devote to an account of his childhood. Everywhere the same! Everywhere they sought “liberty” and “happiness” behind them, in the past, for fear of being reminded of their own responsibility, of being warned they were not striking out for themselves, but merely going the way of all the world. Two or three years passed in drinking and jollification, and then they crept under the common shelter and became serious gentlemen in the service of the state. Yes, it was rotten, our whole system was rotten and these student sillinesses were less stupid and not so bad as a hundred others.

However, when I reached my distant dwelling and went to bed, all these thoughts had flown. Everything else was in suspense as I looked forward to the fulfillment of the promise made to me that day. As soon as I wished, in the morning if I liked, I could see Demian’s mother. Let the students hold their drinking bouts and tattoo their faces, let the world be rotten and on the brink of ruin⁠—what had that to do with me? I was waiting for one single thing, that my fate might meet me in a new picture.