"It won't be forever," pursued Corinne, "and I'll be there on Sundays for dinner."
She spoke cheerfully but she felt as if she were pointing her dear treasurekin to the winter road instead of to shelter. Could she but have lodged her really in her heart!
"I've been thinking about you all this week and planning ever since that hateful Kerzl woman" ... here Corinne was pulled up short by the sudden flush on her aunt's face, she couldn't bear to hear of that even from Corinne.... Frau Kerzl who once had been grateful for a smile or even for advice, to whom she'd sent broth a whole long winter.
Corinne continued gently as flowing water—but as inevitably as water seeking its own level:
"Darling,—and this is how I have arranged for your dinner every day," she spoke even more gently and her touch was soft, the softest touch that thin, trembling hand had ever known. A brightness beyond tears was in her eyes. What was she offering really to her precious, her fragile, her Dresden china aunt?
"On Mondays," she proceeded, striking the simplest chord at first, "Liesel wants you to take dinner with her. She said she'd love to have you."
This wasn't quite exact. What her sister Liesel, married since two years to a young official in the Finance Ministry, Liesel who was very happy, had really said was:
"Of course, I don't mind Tante Ilde coming once a week, we certainly ought to do what we can for her, ... but when Otto comes in he does like to find just me. However, we've got to look out for her, poor dear,—she was always so good to us."
Otto was one of some half or three quarters of a million government employees in Vienna and was doing fairly well, that is well enough for two. He was an expert accountant and as prices went up, so mercifully did his salary. They got along very comfortably in the tiny, three-roomed apartment that Liesel in her smiling way had conjured up out of the abyss of the housing crisis. It sufficed amply for their needs. They lived almost in the style that would have been theirs had they lived and loved a decade earlier. Sometimes in the evening they even went to the theatre, or to a moving picture. What use in keeping money when the next day's fall in exchange made it act like ice in hot water? So with many shrugs of her plump, handsome shoulders Liesel continued to wrest an immediate happiness from the miserable city, and with a special sapience born of love pursued her daily and absorbing round of making her Otto and herself comfortable. They cared a great deal for each other, though the family thought Otto rather a stick and wondered how he had come to find such favor in Liesel's soft, dark eyes. As a husband he had turned out to be vigilant and exclusive as well as loving, a sort of little Turk. Having small natural faith in men and still less in women, from the first he had set about guarding his treasure. It somehow suited Liesel. "But jealous!" she would boast, casting her eyes up delightedly, a finger at her red lip. They were so young too, that they could hope that something, in the many years they expected to live, would happen to place their upset world on its proper feet again, and while awaiting that miracle they were very happy.
Otto sometimes remembered Galicia.... When a certain look came into his face it was because he was hearing those terrible machine guns. He limped slightly, his right knee having been smashed by a ricochet bullet, and he had had his feet frozen in an Italian prison camp and lost the toes of the left foot.... Oh, that mountain camp, that terrible cold, that tiny blanket! If he didn't pull it up about his shoulders he shivered and shook with that deadly central cold and if he did pull it up his feet froze. Sometimes he dreamed of it in that warm bed with Liesel and would awake with a start to find her there, and drawing the feather-bed up higher would sink again into a blessed slumber. He knew that he had been lucky.