me was bad enough, but that you seem to have stopped trying to reach Klamm now is much worse, that’s something which not even the landlady foresaw. According to the landlady your happiness, a questionable and yet very real happiness, would end on the day when you finally recognised that the hopes you founded on Klamm were in vain. But now you don’t wait any longer even for that day, a young lad suddenly comes in and you begin to fight with him for his mother, as if you were fighting for your very life.” “You’ve understood my talk with Hans quite correctly,” said K. , “it was really so. But is your whole former life so completely wiped from your mind (all except the landlady, of course, who won’t allow herself to be wiped out), that you can’t remember any longer how one must fight to get to the top, especially when one begins at the bottom? How one must take advantage of everything that offers any hope whatever? And this woman comes from the Castle, she told me so herself on my first day here, when I happened to stray into Lasemann’s. What’s more natural than to ask her for advice or even for help; if the landlady only knows the obstacles which keep one from reaching Klamm, then this woman probably knows the way to him, for she has come here by that way herself.” “The way to Klamm?” asked Frieda. “To Klamm, certainly, where else?” said K. Then he jumped up: “But now it’s high time I was going for the lunch.” Frieda implored him to stay, urgently, with an eagerness quite disproportionate to the occasion, as if only his staying with her would confirm all the comforting things he had told her. But K. was thinking of the teacher, he pointed towards the door, which any moment might fly open with a thunderous crash, and promised to return at once, she was not even to light the fire, he himself would see about it. Finally Frieda gave in in silence. As K. was stamping through the snow outside⁠—the path should have been shovelled free long ago, strange how slowly the work was getting forward!⁠—he saw one of the assistants, now dead tired, still holding to the railing. Only one, where was the other? Had K. broken the endurance of one of them, then, at least? The remaining one was