you imagine that they’re your own; and that comforts me. But they’re instructive, one can learn a great deal from the landlady. She didn’t express them to me personally, although she did not spare my feelings in other ways; evidently she put this weapon in your hands in the hope that you would employ it at a particularly bad or decisive point for me. If I am abusing you, then she is abusing you in the same way. But Frieda, just consider; even if everything were just as the landlady says, it would only be shameful on one supposition, that is, that you did not love me. Then, only then, would it really seem that I had won you through calculation and trickery, so as to profiteer by possessing you. In that case it might even have been part of my plan to appear before you arm-in-arm with Olga so as to evoke your pity, and the landlady has simply forgotten to mention that too in her list of my offences. But if it wasn’t as bad as all that, if it wasn’t a sly beast of prey that seized you that night, but you came to meet me, just as I went to meet you, and we found one another without a thought for ourselves, in that case, Frieda, tell me, how would things look? If that were really so, in acting for myself I was acting for you too, there is no distinction here, and only an enemy could draw it. And that holds in everything, even in the case of Hans. Besides, in your condemnation of my talk with Hans your sensitiveness makes you exaggerate things morbidly, for if Hans’s intentions and my own don’t quite coincide, still that doesn’t by any means amount to an actual antagonism between them, moreover our discrepancies were not lost on Hans, if you believe that you do grave injustice to the cautious little man, and even if they should have been all lost on him, still nobody will be any the worse for it, I hope.”
“It’s so difficult to see one’s way, K. ,” said Frieda with a sigh. “I certainly had no doubts about you, and if I have acquired something of the kind from the landlady, I’ll be only too glad to throw it off and beg you for forgiveness on my knees, as I do, believe me, all the time, even when I’m saying such horrible things. But the truth remains that you keep many things from me; you come and go, I don’t know where or from where.