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lapsed again into the past tense; but never mind, my pen finds it more convenient so. Yes, she loved me, loved me faithfully. She liked to examine my face this way and that; with finger and thumb, compasswise, she measured my features: the somewhat prickly area above the upper lip, with the longish groove down the middle; the spacious forehead with its twin swellings above the brows; and the nail of her index finger would follow the lines on both sides of my mouth, which was always shut tight and insensitive to tickling. A big face and none too simple; modeled by special order; with a gloss on the cheekbones, the cheeks themselves slightly hollowed and, on the second shaveless day, overspread with a brigandish growth, reddish in certain lights, exactly the same as his beard. Our eyes alone were not quite identical but what likeness did exist between them was a mere luxury; for his were closed as he lay on the ground before me, and though I have never really seen, only felt, my eyelids when shut, I know that they differed in nothing from his eye-eaves—a good word, that! Ornate, but good, and a welcome guest to my prose. No, I am not getting in the least excited; my self-control is perfect. If every now and again my face pops out, as from behind a hedge, perhaps to the prim reader’s annoyance, it is really for the latter’s good: let him get used to my countenance;and in the meantime I shall be chuckling quietly over his not knowing whether it was my face or that of Felix. Here I am! and now—gone again; or may be it was not I! Only by this method can I hope to teach the reader a lesson, demonstrating to him that ours was not an imaginary resemblance, but a real possibility, even more—a real fact, yes, a fact, however fanciful and absurd it might seem.
    On coming back from Prague to Berlin, I found Lydia in the kitchen engaged in beating an egg in a glass—“goggle-moggle,” we called it. “Throaty aches,” she said in a childish voice; then put down the glass upon the edge of the stove, wiped her yellow lips with the back of her wrist and proceeded to kiss my hand. She had on a pink frock, pinkish stockings, dilapidated slippers. The evening sun checkered the kitchen. Again she started to turn the spoon in the thick yellow stuff, grains of sugar crunched slightly, it was still clammy, the spoon did not move smoothly with the velvety ovality that was required. On the stove lay open a battered book. There was a note scribbled in the margin by some person unknown, with a blunt pencil: “Sad, but true” followed by three exclamation marks with their respective dots skidding. I perused the phrase that had appealed so much to one of my wife’s predecessors: “Love thy neighbor,” said Sir Reginald, “is nowadays not quoted on the stock exchange of human relations.”
    “Well—had a good trip?” asked Lydia as she went on energetically turning the handle, with the box-part held firm between her knees. The coffee beans crackled, richly odorous; the mill was still working with a rumbling and creaking effort; then came an easing, a yielding; gone all resistance; empty.
    I have got muddled somehow. As in a dream. She was making that goggle-moggle—not coffee.
    “Could have been worse,” I said, referring to the trip. “And you, how are you getting on?”
    Why did I not tell her of my incredible adventure? I, who would fake wonders for her by the million, seemed not to dare, with those polluted lips of mine, tell her of a wonder that was real. Or maybe something else withheld me. An author does not show people his first draft; a child in the womb is not referred to as Tiny Tom or Belle; a savage refrains from naming objects of mysterious import and uncertain temper; Lydia herself disliked my reading a book she had not yet finished.
    For several days I remained oppressed by that meeting. It oddly disturbed me to think that all the time my double was trudging along roads unknown to me, and that he was underfed and