Then he turned the full blaze of his countenance on Tante Ilde:
"Ach, the dear, lovely Auntie," he cried, "she must also have a Busserl," and he proceeded to kiss each pale cheek and even to press her against his thick, warm breast.
"Not lovely, only loving," she returned, but she smiled, suddenly quite happy and Pauli felt his words had not been in vain. He liked to have happy faces about him and laughter and jokes, and if it were women who were being made happy all the better.
"I smell something good," he next said amiably sniffing in the air, "and I'm quite ready. In the Cafés," he continued, "it's 3,000 crowns for a piece of bread, 10,000 for a glass of beer and 5,000 for a smell of roast pork from the next table!" Again he sniffed gayly. Even when he barked his shins against a hard, low bench that stood unnaturally near the dining table, he gave no sign of the impatience that always possessed him when with Anna. But in spite of his remarks about his hunger, he took very little of the lukewarm soup which Hermine had poured out too soon. And when she dragged her sleeve in the goulash as she put it on the table, he indulgently recounted a joke he had seen in the Meggendorfer Blätter. How a certain woman going into a cheesemonger's had skilfully passed her long sleeve through a dish of white cheese, in that way removing an appreciable quantity, and how the cheesemonger in a rage made her come back to pay for it, threatening to have her up for theft.
Sallow Hermine was greatly in awe of her highly-colored father, who expected from her, she uncomfortably felt, something that she could not offer, but now she was giggling girlishly, and even Anna's face seemed less formless.
Yes, Pauli was doing his best to make it pleasant for the quite accidental beings who bore his name. Dispensing smiles that, after all, were so rightly, though so strangely, theirs. Life was truly mysterious; they were human beings too, come out of nothing, hurrying as fast as Time could take them, to the same end. It produced undeniably at moments a feeling of comradeship,—though Pauli intended to avoid Anna in the other world....
Tante Ilde was indeed making things easier, suaver; Tante Ilde was really an alabaster box of precious ointment, broken anew each time she went into one of those homes not hers, diffusing sweet odors about her. They would mostly, (perhaps not Pauli), have thought: "It's poor old Tante Ilde and we've got to do something for her," not dreaming that all the time it was she who was doing something priceless for them.
Now he was in a fever of longing to hear a beloved name. But she told them first about Liesel and Otto, everything she could without making Anna jealous; not, of course, about the sausage. Meat twice a day would have scandalized Anna, and anyway Tante Ilde would never have been guilty of the indelicacy of speaking about that sausage, wrapped up and put away too. The fresh noodles in fresh butter were all that Anna and Hermine could really stand; they would talk about them for days; but she described in detail the package from the "Friends" at which Anna and Hermine pricked up their big ears and cried: "You don't say!" and Hermine ran and got an inch-long pencil and a piece of newspaper and wrote the address on the margin. Then she and her mother nodded their heads significantly at each other. They were both thinking that Irma should have let them know immediately, and that some afternoon late, when it was dark and they wouldn't be seen, they'd go for one of those packages....
As Tante Ilde was talking Pauli noticed the white lace about her neck and how genteel she contrived to look in spite of age and disaster. Then his eyes travelled to his daughter, seeing her really for the first time that day. Hermine had on a chocolate-colored dress with trimmings of an unpleasant blue. Pauli turned his eyes again to Tante Ilde's cameo face, from which the broad eyes seemed to look out more and more bluely as the dinner went on. Pleasure, even a little, was apt to put the color back into her eyes. Then he looked again at his daughter. He was thinking that the devil could take him if he knew what color would be becoming to his only child. Something, anything to emphasize her, to put her on the chart, so he followed out his natural taste as he said:
"I must give you a new dress, Hermine, pink or red or a good bright blue?"