her hand away from K. , sat erect opposite him and wept without hiding her face; she held her tear-covered face up to him as if she were weeping not for herself and so had nothing to hide, but as if she were weeping over K. ’s teachery and so the pain of seeing her tears was his due—“But in reality everything has changed since I’ve listened to you talking with that boy. How innocently you began asking about the family, about this and that! To me you looked just as you did that night when you came into the taproom, impetuous and frank, trying to catch my attention with such a childlike eagerness. You were just the same as then, and all I wished was that the landlady had been here and could have listened to you, and then we should have seen whether she could still stick to her opinion. But then quite suddenly—I don’t know how it happened—I noticed that you were talking to him with a hidden intention. You won his trust—and it wasn’t easy to win—by sympathetic words, simply so that you might with greater ease reach your end, which I began to recognise more and more clearly. Your end was that woman. In your apparently solicitous enquiries about her I could see quite nakedly your simple preoccupation with your own affairs. You were betraying that woman even before you had won her. In your words I recognized not only my past, but my future as well, it was as if the landlady were sitting beside me and explaining everything, and with all my strength I tried to push her away, but I saw clearly the hopelessness of my attempt, and yet it was not really myself who was going to be betrayed, it was not I who was really being betrayed, but that unknown woman. And then when I collected myself and asked Hans what he wanted to be and he said he wanted to be like you, and I saw that he had fallen under your influence so completely already, well what great difference was there between him, being exploited here by you, the poor boy, and myself that time in the taproom?”
“Everything,” said K. who had regained his composure in listening. “Everything that you say is in a certain sense justifiable, it is not untrue, it is only partisan. These are the landlady’s ideas, my enemy’s ideas, even if