"I'm not at all satisfied with my wife's health again," Paul Schlieben complained to the doctor. "She's in a terribly nervous state again."
"Really?" Dr. Hofmann's friendly face became energetic. "I'll tell you one thing, my dear friend, you must take vigorous measures against it at once."
"That's no use." The man shook his head. "I know my wife. It's the boy's doing, that confounded boy!"
And he took Wolfgang in hand. "Now listen, you must not always be worrying your mother like that. If I notice once more that she is grieving about you because you are naughty, you shall see what I'll do to you."
Did he worry his mother? Wolfgang looked very blank. And surely it was not naughty of him to want to go to the Lämkes? It worried him to have to sit indoors, whilst the wind was whistling outside and playing about with one's hair in such a jolly manner. And it worried him, too, that he was not going to the Lämkes that day.
"Well then, go," said Käte. She even drove into Berlin before dinner and bought a doll, a pretty doll with fair locks, eyes that opened and shut, and a pink dress. "Take it to Frida for her birthday when you go," she said in the afternoon, putting it into the boy's hands. "Stop! Be careful!"
He had seized hold of it impetuously, he was so delighted to be able to bring Frida something. And in a rare fit of emotion--he was no friend of caresses--he put up his face in an outburst of gratitude and let his mother kiss him. He did not want her kiss, but he submitted to it, she felt that very well, but still she was glad, and she followed him with her eyes with a smile that lighted up her whole face.
"But you must be home again before dark," she called out to him at the last moment. Had he heard her?
How he ran off, as light-footed as a stag. She had never seen any child run so quickly. He threw up his straight legs that his heels touched his thighs every time. The wind blew his broad-brimmed sailor hat back, then he tore it off and ran on bareheaded, he was in such a hurry.
What was it that drew him so powerfully to those people?