Then when Otto lighted his Trabuco, Tante Ilde found herself saying just as she had planned:
"I'm going to do the dishes. You stay with Otto, but I must have an apron."
Liesel had been very dear and had said:
"But no, Tante Ilde, you mustn't work when you come to us."
Suddenly her aunt's eyes had filled with tears:
"It would make me so truly happy," she entreated. Then Otto had cried:
"But yes, little goose, let Tante Ilde do as she will!"
So Liesel stayed with Otto and as Tante Ilde went in and out she could hear them talking as if they hadn't seen each other for a week, trying to decide if they would go, that very evening, to a cosy little cabaret in the Annagasse, a stone's throw from their house and Liesel wear her new pink dress; or whether they would go to the Circus Busch movie in the Prater Stern, where it didn't matter what you wore and where they were giving a wonderful moral drama in six acts called "Sinful Blood," and where they would hold hands in the dark just as if they weren't going to spend the night together.
Tante Ilde herself even began to hum that waltz tune from the Graf von Luxenburg, though she had long been nobody's "dear little wife."
When she was putting tenderly away in the tiny cupboard the white plates with the gold "S" that Liesel was also "keeping" for her, she got suddenly a quite unexpected whiff of the once familiar salami, proceeding irrepressibly from a tightly-tied up little package.