ordinary young man, and arrived at early manhood as hungry
as his fellows; but his father was a parson, his grandfather had been a
parson, his uncles were all parsons, and Fate, coming cruelly to him in
the gloomy robes of the Lutheran Church, his natural follies had had no
opportunity of getting out, developing, and dissolving, but remained
shut up in his heart, where they amused themselves by seething
uninterruptedly, to his great discomfort, while the good parson, in
whose care he was, talked to him of the world to come.

"The world to come," thought Klutz, hungering and thirsting for a taste
of the world in which he was, "may or may not be very well in its way;
but its way is not my way." And he listened in a silence that might be
taken either for awed or bored to Manske's expatiations. Manske, of
course, interpreted it as awed. "Our young vicar," he said to his wife,
"thinks much. He is serious and contemplative beyond his years. He is
not a man of many and vain words." To which his wife replied only by a
sniff of scepticism.

She had no direct proofs that Klutz was not serious and contemplative,
but during his first winter in their house he had fallen into her bad
graces because of a certain indelicately appreciative attitude he
displayed towards her apple jelly. Not that she grudged him apple jelly
in just quantities; both she and her husband were fond of it, and the
eating of it was luckily one of those pleasures whose indulgence is
innocent. But there are limits beyond which even jelly becomes vicious,
and these limits Herr Klutz continually overstepped. Every autumn she
made a sufficient number of pots of it to last discreet appetites a
whole year. There had always been vicars in their house, and there had
never been a dearth of jelly. But this year, so early as Easter, there
were only two pots left. She could not conveniently lock it up and
refuse to produce any, for then she and her husband would not have it
themselves; so all through the winter she had watched the pots being
emptied one after the other, and the thinner the rows in her storeroom
grew, the more pronounced became her conviction that Klutz's piety was
but skin deep. A young man who could behave in so unbridled a fashion
could not be really serious; there was something, she thought, that
smacked suspiciously of the flesh and the devil about such conduct.
Great, then, was her astonishment when, the penultimate pot being placed
at Easter on the