This was rough on him, and really looked as if he were out of favour. Nevertheless he was not the man to let a woman's foibles break his heart, and in the Prussian Crown at Münsterberg, only the night before, he had again thoroughly enjoyed a booze in his father's company. This morning the sun laughed down on a world in which there was plenty and to spare of women's love. If only he could have had his clean collar, his satisfaction would have been complete.
He resolved to agitate for this end, and went into the half-dark front kitchen where Lotty, his eldest sister, a lean, unattractive, blonde, sulky and faithful as a beast of burden, was ironing the Sunday clean linen on a large board.
"Am I at last to get a decent rag to put round my neck?" he shouted at her.
Dumbly she handed him a collar.
"Do you call that a collar?" he cried, twirling the limp strip round his fingers. "Do you call that piece of dish-clout a collar, I say?"
"If your linen isn't starched to your liking, get it up yourself," the sister answered snappishly, and put the bellows in the fire under the iron-rest till smoke and cinders flew about the room.
"It's a disgrace," Kurt said, "that a man should be compelled to interfere in such sordid household matters."
"Why don't you earn money enough to keep a laundress of your own?" asked his sister.
Instead of an answer, he threw the collar at her head, and she screamed out for help to her mother.
She appeared on the scene in a white dressing-jacket, and her grizzled hair caught up with a celluloid comb. Three of the small fry trotted after her. She was already worried and irritable.