"Oh, Pauli, how reckless! If we're going to have meat, boiled beef would be nice." Indeed to Frau Stacher, desperately needing the stimulus of meat—any kind would have done, though the boiled beef she humbly suggested didn't inhabit the Paradise where young chickens abided, eternally cut in two waiting to be cooked and eaten.
"But not at all!" he cried, "we're going to have a feast," and he gave the order for the chicken and asked for the wine-card, selecting an Arleberger, that a friend in Budapest made a specialty of.
Tante Ilde felt vaguely, pleasantly like a woman in a romance, interesting but unreal. It wasn't only the food, but that looking at the menu and ordering right out of the heart of it, without other guide than what was the best. It conjured up the agreeable ghosts of those far-off comfortable years; and then to be carried along on that stream of love and immediate affection. She blessèdly forgot the dark depths of those waters that surged about Pauli and Corinne....
"Next week, if you insist, we can be less grand," Pauli was saying, "boiled beef then, and the week after no meat at all. That's the way it goes in Vienna now," he continued cheerfully. And then Corinne in her pleasant way of alluding to pleasant things said:
"Auntie, you remember the 'marinierter' carp you used to give us at Baden on Friday?"
Frau Stacher flushed at this that was like a blow on memory, but she only said with a retrospective look,
"Yes, Frieda did do it well,—and the Fogosch too," she added. In those days the beautiful blue Danube had seemed to fill one of its natural uses in supplying her table with that, her favorite fish. But it all seemed strangely uninteresting to her. She was trying vainly to keep her thoughts, so unaccountably, so uncomfortably wandering, close within her body, within that pleasant room from which all three of them must too soon depart.
Pauli's love was almost visibly enfolding Corinne, just as his affection was flowing about Tante Ilde. So different the two, as different and distinct as two primary colors, yet blending. She felt wrapt in something warm and many-colored, and what its pattern was she no longer tried to see. Then suddenly and anxiously she was aware that there was still the transparency about Corinne that, as she watched her approach that morning, she thought had come up from the wet, shining streets, but there in the warm, dark restaurant it was the same....
Her likeness to Fanny, too, was very apparent, there were but two years in time between them, ... though so many other things.... She had never noticed it so clearly, not even when they were children. The same blue eyes, with their sudden oblique look; in Corinne it was disturbing, in Fanny devastating. The same pale, shining hair, the same fine nose; only in Fanny all was more accented, more complete. Her eyes were bigger and bluer, her hair yellower and thicker, her complexion more dazzling, the oval of her face more perfect. Yet Corinne ... her face had not indeed the glitter of Fanny's blinding, noonday beauty, but its moonbeam charm was forever working its own pale magic....
Then the half chicken for each with its little round mound of rice was brought on, and though Pauli took out his glass to look at his, and speculated on the evidently not distant hour of its hatching, still it was quite delicious, and that shining gravy over the rice!