"Ruin?"
"Yes, they say that you ruined me, sir, because I find that there's nothing new in the world."
"Hm! Hm! I suppose you tell them that their jokes are stale?"
"Yes; everything they say is stale; they are so stale themselves that they make me sick."
"Indeed! And don't you think that being a waiter is stale?"
"Yes, I do; life and death and everything is an old story—no—to be an actor would be something new."
"No, my friend. That is the stalest of all stale stories. But shut up, now! I want to forget myself."
He drank his absinth and rested his head against the wall with its long, brown streak, the track on which the smoke of his cigar had ascended during the six long years he had been sitting there, smoking. The rays of the sun fell through the window, passing through the sieve of the great aspens outside, whose light foliage, dancing in the evening breeze, threw a tremulous net on the long wall. The shadow of the melancholy man's head, with its untidy locks of hair, fell on the lowest corner of the net and looked very much like a huge spider.
Gustav had returned to the clock, where he sat plunged in nihilistic silence, watching the flies dancing round the hanging lamp.
"Gustav!" came a voice from the spider's web.