him. Seemann was glad to have got it out. He was so pleased with himself that he even forgot his exaggerated tact, and pointed to the diploma hanging on the wall and made a sign with his finger. Father nodded and went to fetch it, but his hands trembled so much that he couldn’t get it off the hook. I climbed on a chair and helped him. From that moment he was done for, he didn’t even take the diploma out of its frame, but handed the whole thing over to Seemann. Then he sat down in a corner and neither moved nor spoke to anybody, and we had to attend to the last people there by ourselves as well as we could.” “And where do you see in all this the influence of the Castle?” asked K. “So far it doesn’t seem to have come in. What you’ve told me about is simply the ordinary senseless fear of the people, malicious pleasure in hurting a neighbour, specious friendship, things that can be found anywhere, and, I must say, on the part of your father⁠—at least, so it seems to me⁠—a certain pettiness, for what was the diploma? Merely a testimonial to his abilities, these themselves weren’t taken from him, if they made him indispensable so much the better, and the one way he could have made things difficult for the Captain would have been by flinging the diploma at his feet before he had said two words. But the significant thing to me is that you haven’t mentioned Amalia at all; Amalia, who was to blame for everything, apparently stood quietly in the background and watched the whole house collapse.” “No,” said Olga, “nobody ought to be blamed, nobody could have done anything else, all that was already due to the influence of the Castle.” “Influence of the Castle,” repeated Amalia, who had slipped in unnoticed from the courtyard; the old people had been long in bed. “Is it Castle gossip you’re at? Still sitting with your heads together? And yet you wanted to go away immediately you came, K. , and it’s nearly ten now. Are you really interested in that kind of gossip? There are people in the village who live on it, they stick their heads together just like you two and entertain each other by the hour. But I didn’t think you were one of them.” “On the contrary,” said K. , “that’s exactly what I am, and moreover people who don’t care for such gossip