Paul went with his card—which bore Elsbeth’s hand-writing—behind a haystack, and there studied each letter of it in solitude for wellnigh an hour.
Then he went up to his garret and stood before the looking glass.
He found that his whiskers had grown in fulness and only at the cheeks still showed thin places.
“It will do very well,” he said, in an attack of vanity, but when he saw himself smile he wondered at the deep sad lines which ran from his eyes, past his nose, down to the corners of his mouth.
“Wrinkles make one interesting,” he consoled himself by thinking.
From this hour he exclusively thought about what role he was to play at the party.
He practised before the looking glass making stylish bows, and every morning looked at his Sunday suit, and tried to hide the shabbiness of his coat by brushing some black color over it.
The invitation had caused a great revolution in his mind It was for him a greeting from the promised land of joy, which he, like Moses, had never seen but from afar. It was not for nothing that he was twenty years old.
The day of the party arrived. His sisters had put on their white muslin dresses and fastened dark roses in their hair. They skipped up and down before the looking glass and asked each other, “Am I beautiful?’ And though each willingly replied” Yes,’ to this question, they hardly knew how beautiful they were.
His mother sat in a corner, looked at them and smiled.