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Minna, quite unmoved by this outburst, for such outbursts were part of the routine and her mistress calmed down as quickly as she flared up, “you just said that if you love someone you sometimes have to tell them disagreeable truths. Then I have to reply that Wolf isn’t Petra’s son.”
    Whereupon Minna stalked off, the tray rattling in her hand, while as a sign that she expected to have peace and quietness in “her” kitchen, she slammed the door.
    Frau Pagel understood quite well and respected her old servant’s familiar hint. She only shouted after her: “You old donkey. Always feeling insulted. Always losing your temper about nothing at all.” She laughed; her anger had evaporated. “Such an old donkey, imagining that love consists of saying disagreeable things to the other person.” She crossed the room. Her outburst had taken place only after she had finished her breakfast, and she was therefore in the best of spirits. The little quarrel had refreshed her. Stopping before a smallcabinet, she selected a long black Brazil cigar, lit it carefully, and went across to her husband’s room.
    VI
    On the door of the flat, over the brass bell-pull (a lion’s mouth) was a porcelain name plate: “Edmund Pagel—Attaché.” Frau Pagel was getting on for seventy, and it therefore didn’t look as if her husband had made much progress in his career. Attachés advanced in years are unusual.
    Edmund Pagel, however, had gone as far as the most efficient councillor or ambassador—that is, as far as the cemetery. When Frau Pagel went into her husband’s room, it was not to visit him but only those reminders of him which were renowned far beyond the walls of the little home.
    She flung the windows wide open; light and air flowed in from the gardens. In this small street, so close to the traffic that of an evening one could hear the elevated railway enter Nollendorfplatz station and the buses rumbling day and night, there was a straggle of old gardens with tall trees—long-forgotten gardens which had scarcely changed since the ‘eighties. Here it was good to live—for aging people. The elevated might thunder and the dollar climb—but the widowed Frau Pagel looked tranquilly into the gardens. Creeping vine had ascended to her windows; down below, everything grew, flowered, seeded—but the frenzied, restless people yonder with their turmoil and commerce did not know it. She could look and remember, she need not hurry, the garden would remind her. That she could live on here, that she did not need to hurry, was the doing of the man whose work was in this room.
    Five-and-forty years ago they had seen each other for the first time, loved and married. Nothing was as radiant, as happy, as swift as Edmund, when she looked back. It always seemed as if she were running with him in a beautiful breeze down streets full of blossoms. Branches seemed to reach down to them over walls. They ran faster. The sky soared over them from the top of a hill full of houses.…
    As long as they kept running, the blue silk curtain in front of them would continue to open.
    Yes, what characterized Edmund was his speed, which had nothing hasty about it, but it came from his strength, his sense of perfect well-being. They reached a meadow with crocuses. For a moment they remained motionless on the festive green and purple carpet, and then bent to pick the flowers. But hardly had she had twenty in her hand then he came to her, swiftly, with no rush, light of step, with a whole big bouquet.
    “How did you do that?” she asked breathlessly.
    “I don’t know,” he said, “I feel so light, like I’m blowing in the wind.”
    They had been married for quite a while when in her sleep the young wife heard a cry. She awoke. Her husband was sitting up in bed, looking altogether changed. She hardly recognized him.
    “Is that you?” she asked, very softly lest her words turn the dream into reality.
    The strange yet familiar man tried to smile, an