“Dear little Georg, you must go to the nursing home again! Alexis has become worse. I can’t bear to see him suffer. My nerves are quite exhausted. Yes, it would quite finish me. I have some friends here but they must leave, they must leave at once.... I am simply done....”
Georg turned away. Her perfume enveloped him. As she bent forward he saw with a shudder her dazzling white breasts move below her low-cut frock. He suddenly felt a strange sickening shame that she should be his mother, that he had sprung from her body. He jumped out of his chair:
“No, mamma, you go yourself!” he exclaimed.
But she clung to him, moaned, begged, caressed, kissed him. Yes, in her miserable panic she seemed to have forgotten that he was her son and she was prepared to employ all the artifices that a frightened woman can employ in order to move a man.
Georg jumped up and pushed her away from him:
“Leave me alone!” he said, “I don’t want you to touch me!”
Merely from anxiety and in order to get away from her he at last rushed out for the second time to the sick man.
Laura stood at the table with a rigid smile on her lips. The danger she had escaped seemed to have numbed every limb in her body. She pulled her shawl over her bare shoulders. Her son’s contempt passed like a chill shiver over her skin. Your own flesh and blood! Bah! The boy was like wax in her hands.
She went into the sitting room. She walked slowly and carefully. It seemed as if there were something cold, frail and motionless within her, something that could not bear a shock.
Laura excused herself to her guests: