“She can’t forget how wild Theresa has been,” said Frau Ledermann. “Who could—with the child there? I heard that last Sunday evening Theresa had hysterics and said that she would not marry this man. They had to get the priest to her.”
“Where is the other one?” asked Frau Brechenmacher. “Why didn’t he marry her?”
The woman shrugged her shoulders.
“Gone—disappeared. He was a traveller, and only stayed at their house two nights. He was selling shirt buttons—I bought some myself, and they were beautiful shirt buttons—but what a pig of a fellow! I can’t think what he saw in such a plain girl—but you never know. Her mother says she’s been like fire ever since she was sixteen!”
Frau Brechenmacher looked down at her beer and blew a little hole in the froth.
“That’s not how a wedding should be,” she said; “it’s not religion to love two men.”
“Nice time she’ll have with this one,” Frau Rupp exclaimed. “He was lodging with me last summer and I had to get rid of him. He never changed his clothes once in two months, and when I spoke to him of the smell in his room he told me he was sure it floated up from the shop. Ah, every wife has her cross. Isn’t that true, my dear?”
Frau Brechenmacher saw her husband among his colleagues at the next table. He was drinking far too much, she knew—gesticulating wildly, the saliva spluttering out of his mouth as he talked.
“Yes,” she assented, “that’s true. Girls have a lot to learn.”
Wedged in between these two fat old women, the Frau had no hope of being asked to dance. She watched the couples going round and round; she forgot her five babies and her man and felt almost like a girl again. The music sounded sad and sweet. Her roughened hands clasped and unclasped themselves in the folds of her skirt. While the music went on she was afraid to look anybody in the face, and she smiled with a little nervous tremor round the mouth.