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gone to play tennis. He will be back for lunch. But we’ve already met, you know.”
    “ Bitte? ” said Franz, straining his eyes.
    Later, when he remembered this meeting, the mirage of the garden, that sun-melting dress, he marvelled at the length of time it had taken him to recognize her. At three paces he was able to make out a person’s features at least as clearly as a normal human eye would through a gauze veil. Rather naively he told himself that he had never seen her hatless before, and had not expected her to wear her hair with a parting in the middle and a chignon behind (the only particular in which Martha did not follow the fashion); still it was not so simple to explain how it could have happenedthat, even in that dim perception of the phantom form, there had not worked again and at once the same tremor, the same magic that had fascinated him the day before. It seemed to him afterwards that on that morning he had been plunged in a vague irreproducible world existing for one brief Sunday, a world where everything was delicate and weightless, radiant and unstable. In this dream anything could happen: so it did turn out after all that Franz had not awakened in his hotel bed that morning but had merely passed into the next stratum of sleep. In the unsubstantial radiance of his myopia, Martha bore no resemblance at all to the lady in the train who had glowed like a picture and yawned like a tigress. Her madonna-like beauty that he had glimpsed and then lost now appeared in full as if this were her true essence now blooming before him without any admixture, without flaw or frame. He could not have said with certitude if he found this blurry lady attractive. Nearsightedness is chaste. And besides, she was the wife of the man on whom depended his whole future, out of whom he had been ordered to squeeze everything he possibly could, and this fact made her seem at the very moment of acquaintance more distant, more unattainable than the glamorous stranger of the preceding day. As he followed Martha up the path to the house he gesticulated, kept apologizing for his infirmity, broken glasses, closed shops, and extolling the marvels of coincidence, so intoxicating was his desire to dispose her favorably toward him as quickly as possible.
    On the lawn near the porch stood a very tall beach umbrella and under it a small table and several wicker armchairs. Martha sat down, and Franz, grinning and blinking, sat down beside her. She decided that she had stunned him completely with the sight of her small but expensive garden which contained among other things five beds of dahlias,three larches, two weeping willows, and one magnolia, and did not bother to ascertain if those poor wild eyes could distinguish a beach umbrella from an ornamental tree. She enjoyed receiving him so elegantly auf englische Weise , dazzling him with undreamt-of wealth, and was looking forward to showing him the villa, the miniatures in the parlor, and the satinwood in the bedroom, and hearing this rather handsome boy’s moans of respectful admiration. And, since generally her visitors were people from her own circle whom she had long since grown tired of dazzling, she felt tenderly grateful to this provincial with his starched collar and narrow trousers for giving her an opportunity to renew the pride she had known in her first months of marriage.
    “It’s so quiet here,” said Franz. “I thought Berlin would be so noisy.”
    “Oh, but we live almost in the country,” she answered, and feeling herself seven years younger, added: “the next villa over there belongs to a count. A very nice old man, we see a lot of him.”
    “Very pleasant—this quiet simple atmosphere,” said Franz, steadily developing the theme and already foreseeing a blind alley.
    She looked at his pale pink-knuckled hand with a nice long index lying flat on the table. The thin fingers were trembling slightly.
    “I have often tried to decide,” she said, “whom does one