Philippina opened her mouth and eyes as wide as she could when she saw Dorothea standing before the mirror, stripped to the hips, studying the symmetry of her body with a seriousness that no one had ever noticed in her before.
Dorothea became coldly indifferent toward her child; it seemed that she had entirely forgotten that she was a mother. The baby slept in the room with Philippina and Agnes, both of whom cared for it. Its mother was otherwise engaged.
As if to make up for lost time and to indemnify herself for the suffering and general inconvenience to which she had been put in the last few months, Dorothea rushed with mad greediness into new pleasures and strange diversions. Soon however she found herself embarrassed from a lack of funds. Daniel told her, kindly but firmly, that the salaries he was drawing as organist and teacher were just barely enough to keep the house going, and that he was curtailing his own personal needs as much as possible so that there would be no cause to discontinue or diminish the home comforts they had latterly been enjoying. “We are not peasants,” he said, “and that we are not living from the mercy of chance is a flaw in me rather than in my favour.”
“You old pinch-penny!” said Dorothea. Ugly wrinkles appeared on her brow. “If you had not made me disgusted with my art, I might have been able to make a little money too,” she added.
He looked down at the floor in complete silence. She however began thinking about ways and means of getting her hands on money. “Uncle Carovius might help me,” she thought. She took to visiting her father more frequently, and every time she came she would stand out in the hall for a while hoping to see Herr Carovius. One day he appeared. She wanted to speak to him, smile at him, win him over. But one look from that face, filled with petrified and ineradicable rage, showed her that any attempt to approach the old man and get him in a friendly frame of mind would be fruitless.
On the way home she chanced to meet the actor Edmund Hahn. She had not seen him since she had been married. The actor seemed tremendously pleased to see her. They walked along together, engaged in a zealous conversation, talking at first loudly and then gently.
IX
The day Dorothea got married, Herr Carovius had gone to his lawyer to have the will he had drawn up the night before attested to. He had bequeathed his entire fortune, including his home and the furniture, to an institution to be erected after his death for the benefit of orphans of noble birth. Baron Eberhard von Auffenberg had been named as first director of the institution and sole executor of his will.
Herr Carovius refused to have anything more to do with music. He had a leather cover made for his long, narrow grand piano, and enshrouded in this, the instrument resembled a stuffed animal. He looked back on his passion for music as one of the aberrations of his youth, though he realised that he was chastising his spirit till it hurt when he took this attitude.