the Superintendent’s evidence, they have a significance which is only private and obscure, it is true, but still great.” “Did the Superintendent say that?” asked Olga. “Yes, he did,” replied K. “I must tell Barnabas that,” said Olga quickly, “that will encourage him greatly.” “But he doesn’t need encouragement,” said K. “to encourage him amounts to telling him that he’s right, that he has only to go on as he is doing now, but that is just the way he will never achieve anything by. If a man has his eyes bound you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he’ll never see anything. He’ll be able to see only when the bandage is removed. It’s help Barnabas needs, not encouragement. Only think, up there you have all the inextricable complications of a great authority—I imagined that I had an approximate conception of its nature before I came here, but how childish my ideas were!—up there, then, you have the authorities and over against them Barnabas, nobody more, only Barnabas, pathetically alone, where it would be enough honour for him to spend his whole life cowering in a dark and forgotten corner of some bureau.” “Don’t imagine, K. , that we underestimate the difficulties Barnabas has to face,” said Olga, “we have reverence enough for the authorities, you said so yourself.” “But it’s a mistaken reverence,” said K. , “a reverence in the wrong place, the kind of reverence that dishonours its object. Do you call it reverence that leads Barnabas to abuse the privilege of admission to that room by spending his time there doing nothing, or makes him when he comes down again belittle and despise the men before whom he has just been trembling, or allows him because he’s depressed or weary to put off delivering letters and fail in executing commissions entrusted to him? That’s far from being reverence. But I have a further reproach to make, Olga; I must blame you too, I can’t exempt you. Although you fancy you have some reverence for the authorities you sent Barnabas into the Castle in all his youth and weakness and forlornness, or at least you didn’t dissuade him from going.”
“This reproach that you make,” said Olga, “is one I have made myself from the beginning. Not indeed that I sent Barnabas to the Castle, I