How pretty she was. The boy's dark eyes were fixed on Frida Lämke as though he had never seen her before. The sun was shining on her fair hair, which she no longer wore in a long plait, but in a thick knot at the back of her head. Her face was so round, so blooming.
"You never come to see me now," he said.
"How can I?" She shrugged her shoulders and assumed an air of importance. "What do you think I have to do? Into town with the car before eight in the morning, and then only two hours for my dinner always in and out and in the evening I'm hardly ever at home before ten, often still later. Then I'm so tired, I sleep as sound as a top. But on Sundays mother lets me sleep as long as I like, and in the afternoon I go out with Artur and Flebbe. We----"
"Where do you go?" he asked hastily. "I could go with you some time."
"Oh, you!" She laughed at him. "You mayn't, you know."
"No." He bowed his head.
"Come, don't look so glum," she said encouragingly, stroking his chin with her fore-finger, and disclosing a hole in her shabby kid glove. "You go to college, you see. Artur is to be apprenticed too, next autumn. Mother thinks to a hairdresser. And Flebbe is already learning to be a grocer--his father can afford to do that--who knows? perhaps he may have a shop of his own in time."
"Yes," said Wolfgang in a monotonous voice, breaking into her chatter. He stood in the street as though lost in thought, his books pressed under his arm. Oh, how far, far this girl, all three of them, had gone from him all at once. Those three, with whom he had once played every day, whose captain he had always been, were already so big, and he, he was still a silly school-boy.
"Oh, hang it all!" He hurled his pile of books away from him with a violent gesture, so that the strap that held them together came undone. All the books and exercise-books flew apart, and lay spread out in the dust of the street.
"Oh dear, Wölfchen!" Frida stooped down, quite terrified, and gathered them all up.