"Frau Freytag is an angel," said the doctor icily.
"An angel," agreed the other, and became silent.
After a moment's silence Max Freytag resumed:
"Do you believe, doctor, that her presence and propinquity does me harm physically?"
And all the egoism of an invalid, of a consumptive, was in the anxiety of this question.
"No," replied the doctor precisely, "it does you no harm."
"Without her I could not live," groaned the consumptive.
"But she could die," declared Karl Ehbehard, fixing Max Freytag with his sharp eyes, and piercing his soul.
"Charlotte is so young, so strong, so beautiful," stammered Max Freytag.
The doctor said nothing more. Then Ludwig Freytag opened his thick, florid lips and slowly told the doctor the progress of his malady. It was graver than that of his brother, and while nothing revealed it externally, while nothing but the expert eye of Karl Ehbehard could have discovered its creeping, it was making a constant, destructive, almost invincible progress. While he spoke of the long fits of coughing that suffocated him, morning, evening, and night, of his agitated slumbers, of his profuse nocturnal sweating, of the fever that assailed him at every dawn; fat, gross, rosy, with a bull neck, and his round, limpidly-blue eyes, almost obese on his short legs, Ludwig Freytag seemed the picture of health. Seized by the fixed idea of the disease that was consuming them, Max Freytag, who seemed the more ill, and Ludwig Freytag, actually the more ill although he did not recognise it, began to lament, now the one, then the other, of the horrible existence they were living—Max for ten years, Ludwig for five, the one thirty-five, the other thirty—an existence consisting only of medical cures, of a rigorous régime, of obligatory sojournings and obligatory journeys. Ah, how above everything the two brothers complained of having to live far-away from Vienna, from Frankfort, from Hamburg, from London; far from their banking-houses, from the colossal port whence their ships departed, far from their powerful businesses and their vast interests, and so losing their great chances of gaining millions with their stagnating fortune.