"I'm speculating in everything," he continued vigorously, "I've joined the Black Bourse Brigade, it's where you pick up trillions," and with an airy gesture he pulled out a wallet and showed Tante Ilde some magic-working dollars and some potent English pounds, but which last in a subtle way gave place to the noisier charm of the dollars.
"Everybody speculates," he went on, "the lift boys in the hotels, the porters at the stations, the old women selling newspapers. Everybody. It's in the air."
Then as they were finishing the last of the rice and gravy, with little crumbs of bread added so that not a bit should be lost, Corinne gave voice slowly to what she had in mind, looking narrowly, slantingly at Pauli:
"Tante Ilde is going to Fanny's tomorrow for her dinner."
"To Fanny's tomorrow?" he questioned in an astonishment that caused Tante Ilde's face to flush a deep rose. To Pauli's way of thinking though a good many things were done, certain others weren't. Tante Ilde's going to Fanny's clearly fell under the latter head. Saints and sinners were mostly all the same to him. One could rarely tell which was which anyway, but somehow this....
"Fanny is so good to us—I don't think she always has it,—as easy as it seems," she faltered, feeling quite uncomfortable, not because she was going, but because of Pauli's strange look.
"Fanny is a good fellow," he answered slowly, reflectively, but he looked at neither of the women as he spoke. The fact was that for all his experience of men and matters Pauli himself had come to a point where he didn't understand anything anymore than they did. Life was for him, as for them, one great confusion. Except his terrible need for Corinne, clear, urgent, urgent beyond any words.... But now this picture of Tante Ilde at Fanny's! Tante Ilde shining white, Tante Ilde who thought that all wolves were lambs inside and even in process of being devoured scarcely perceived their true nature. Life was, indeed, presenting itself in its most unreasonable and confounding aspect. "Much will be forgiven her because she has loved much," was all right for everything except just this ... or if a daughter had been in question. Then he tried honestly to think, not according to that feeling that had leapt up in him at Corinne's words, but according to his usual way of easy judgment.
"Fanny has a gold heart, I can't tell you not to go," he hesitated, "she deserves it," he finished at last, but evidently against the grain. Pauli was really very ill at ease at that special manifestation of the disorder of their world. Where were your feet and where your head? Tante Ilde at Fanny's! What after all did it mean? All kinds of saints in the world, he knew. Still it was a pity, among a thousand other pities. Indeed Pauli was shocked in a way that neither of the women were. Pauli, to whom nothing human was foreign, was shocked at a little thing like Tante Ilde's going to Fanny's, when everybody, everywhere was up against real death and destruction—a detail like that and he who had seen everything was not only shocked but horrified. Riddle. Riddle. Then suddenly he changed the conversation and pulled out his wallet again, crying, without any noticeable preamble:
"Tante Ilde must have a presentli!"
Uncomfortably he felt that the special problem confronting them had grown out of material ruin; lack of security was, after all, regulating that situation. In a word when you didn't have money you did a lot of things that you didn't do when you had it. It was as plain and as stupid as that.... It put decency on an indecent footing or vice versa. And morality, why morality positively had its legs in the air.