"I am in your debt, Herr Dernburg, I know it----"
"That you are not! If I have given you education and culture, you have saved my Eric for me; but for you I should have lost my only son. So far as that goes, we are quits, if we propose to balance accounts on a purely business basis. If that is what you propose, speak out openly, and we are done with each other."
"You do me injustice," said Runeck, with suppressed emotion. "It is hard enough for me thus to oppose you."
"Well, who forces you to do so? Only those wild ideas, that have run away with you so. Do you think it is an easy thing for me to give you up? Be reasonable, Egbert. It is not your chief who speaks to you--he would have long since cut the matter short! But for years you have been almost a child of my house."
The half-fatherly, half-masterful tone entirely missed its aim. The young engineer, with arrogant self-assertion, raised his head, as he answered:
"I am possessed by those 'wild ideas,' and stick to them. There comes a time when the boy becomes of age, and I reached this state when out in the world, and I cannot go back to the irresponsibility of boyhood. Whatever you demand of the engineer, the official, shall be done to the best of my ability. The blind subjection that you demand of the man, I cannot and will not take upon myself. I must have free course in life."
"Which you have not with me?" asked Dernburg in an irritated tone.
"No!" said Egbert firmly. "You are a father to your subordinates so long as they submit themselves unquestioningly, but in Odensburg they recognize only one law--viz., your will. The director yields just as unconditionally as does the lowest laborer; no one has an opinion of his own at your works, or ever will have, so long as you are at the head of things."
"Those are pretty things, to be sure, that you attribute to me," said Dernburg fiercely. "You say, plainly, that I am a tyrant. You, to be sure, have always been allowed to take more liberties than all the rest put together--have done so, candidly, too. You never were passively obedient, nor was such a thing required of you, either, for we'll talk of that later. Free course! There again is one of your catch-words. With you, all is to be down, all, and then you will have free course--to destruction."
He had risen to his feet, and walked to and fro several times, like a person trying to compose himself, then he paused in front of the young man, and said with bitter scorn: