It is worth dwelling in some detail on the crisis of this story, because it brings together a number of characteristic elements and makes of them a curious, riddling compound obscurely but centrally significant for Mann's work.

The wife, Amra, and her lover are both savagely portrayed, she as incarnate sensuality, ``voluptuous'' and ``indolent,'' possibly ``a mischief maker,'' with ``a kind of luxurious cunning'' to set against her apparent simplicity, her ``bird like brain.'' La^utner, for his part, ``belonged to the present-day race of small artists, who do not demand the utmost of themselves,'' and the bitter description of the type includes such epithets as ``wretched little poseurs,'' the devastating indictment ``they do not know how to be wretched decently and in order,'' and the somewhat extreme prophecy, so far not fulfilled: ``They will be destroyed.''

The trick these two play upon Jacoby reveals their want not simply of decency but of imagination as well. His appearance as Lizzy evokes not amusement but horror in the audience; it is a spectacle absolutely painful, an epiphany of the suffering flesh unredeemed by spirit, untouched by any spirit other than abasement and humiliation. At the same time the multiple transvestitism involved -- the fat man as girl and as baby, as coquette pretending to be a baby -- touches for a moment horrifyingly upon the secret sources of a life like Jacoby's, upon the sinister dreams which form the sources of any human life.