Along in the afternoon he appeared at the sheriff's house.
Gülcke was the only one of the functionaries of his time who still kept his office, after Rist had left. He was still there, nursed by a careful wife, who had ever surrounded him with a padding of pillows, visible and invisible.
Grip knew what he was doing; he wanted to find the mistress, while the sheriff was in his office.
She was sitting in an easy chair snugly behind the double windows in the sitting-room with her knitting-work and The Wandering Jew before her, while her clever sister Thea, an unmarried woman now in the thirties, was looking after the dinner out in the kitchen.
Thinka took the care of the house upon herself after Miss Gülcke's death, and was her old husband's support and crutch unweariedly the whole twenty-four hours together.
And these greasy, worn books of fiction from the city, with numbers on their backs, were the little green spot left for her to pass her own life on.
Like so many other women of those times, to whom reality had not left any other escape than to take any man who could support her, she lived in these novels—in the midst of the most harshly creaking commonplaces—a highly strained life of fancy. There she imagined the passions she herself might have had. There were loves and hates, there were two noble hearts—in spite of everything—happily united; or she consoled picturesque heroes, who in despair were gazing into the billows.
There—in the clouds—was continued the life with its unquenchable thirst of the heart and of the spirit for which reality had not given any firm foothold—and there the matronly figure which had become somewhat large, cozily round and plump, and which was once the small, slender Thinka, transferred her still unforgotten Aas from one heroic form to another—from Emilie Carlén to James, from Walter Scott to Bulwer, from Alexander Dumas to Eugène Sue.
There in her domestic, bustling sister's place lay the sewing, with a ray of sunshine on the chair.