"I do not understand Lina," the captain says, with irritation. "You surely are not reduced to the necessity of renting part of your small house for lodgings."
"Mamma wanted just two hundred guilders to buy Littré's Dictionary,--the fine complete edition. Moreover, I think you are under a mistake with regard to our resources. I detest the railway, but if it had not bought of us, two years ago, a piece of land on which to build a shop, I hardly know what we should be living upon now. Ah, if poor papa could see how we live! He could not imagine a household without a butler or a lady's-maid. Mamma dismissed the butler at first upon strictly moral grounds----"
Anastasia von Gurlichingen casts down her eyes. "Did you ever hear anything like that, Baron Rohritz," she asks, "from a young girl?"
Rohritz shrugs his shoulders impatiently, and Stella goes on quite at her ease:
"He was always making love to the cook, and the lady's-maid was jealous and complained of it. Then the lady's-maid was dismissed, for pecuniary reasons; then the cook, for sanitary considerations: one fine day she nearly poisoned us all with verdigris, her copper kettles were so badly scoured. Her place was never filled, for in the interim, that is, while we were looking for a new cordon bleu, mamma discovered that a cook was a very costly article and that we could get along without one. Our last maid-of-all work was a dwarf not quite four feet tall, who had to mount on a stool to set the table. Mamma engaged her because she thought that her ugliness would put a stop to love-making----" Stella breaks the thread of her discourse to laugh gently; her laugh is like the ripple of a brook. "But real talent defies all obstacles. Mamma's experiment made her richer by one sad experience: she knows now that not even a large hump can make its possessor impervious to Cupid's arrows."
The captain laughs. Stasy's disapprobation has reached its climax; she twitches impatiently at the worsted she is winding from Rohritz's hands.
"What would papa say if he could see it all?" Stella says, in a changed voice.
"Do you still grieve so for your poor father, mouse?" the captain asks, kindly, perceiving that the girl with difficulty restrains her tears at the mention of her dead father.
"You would not ask that, uncle, if you knew what a life I lead," she replies, in a choked voice. "Yes, it is amusing enough to tell of, but to live---- There is no use in thinking of it!" She bends slightly above her little cousin, whose head is resting quietly upon his father's shoulder. "He is sound asleep," she whispers, brushing away a fluttering night-moth from Freddy's pretty face,--"poor little man!"
"It is growing cool," Katrine declares, glancing anxiously towards Freddy in the midst of the Baroness's interesting discourse upon the latest achievements of medical science, and then, rising, she leaves her sister-in-law to go to her little son, saying, "Give me the boy, Jack. I will carry him up-stairs."