uld be no doubt that there was something between
the pair, and other people in the Frau Professor's house saw them lurking
in dark places. The elderly ladies who sat at the head of the table began
to discuss what was now a scandal. The Frau Professor was angry and
harassed. She had done her best to see nothing. The winter was at hand,
and it was not as easy a matter then as in the summer to keep her house
full. Herr Sung was a good customer: he had two rooms on the ground floor,
and he drank a bottle of Moselle at each meal. The Frau Professor charged
him three marks a bottle and made a good profit. None of her other guests
drank wine, and some of them did not even drink beer. Neither did she wish
to lose Fraulein Cacilie, whose parents were in business in South America
and paid well for the Frau Professor's motherly care; and she knew that if
she wrote to the girl's uncle, who lived in Berlin, he would immediately
take her away. The Frau Professor contented herself with giving them both
severe looks at table and, though she dared not be rude to the Chinaman,
got a certain satisfaction out of incivility to Cacilie. But the three
elderly ladies were not content. Two were widows, and one, a Dutchwoman,
was a spinster of masculine appearance; they paid the smallest possible
sum for their pension, and gave a good deal of trouble, but they were
permanent and therefore had to be put up with. They went to the Frau
Professor and said that something must be done; it was disgraceful, and
the house was ceasing to be respectable. The Frau Professor tried
obstinacy, anger, tears, but the three old ladies routed her, and with a
sudden assumption of virtuous indignation she said that she would put a
stop to the whole thing.

After luncheon she took Cacilie into her bed-room and began to talk very
seriously to her; but to her amazement the girl adopted a brazen attitude;
she proposed to go about as she liked; and if she chose to walk with the
Chinaman she could not see it was anybody's business but her own. The Frau
Professor threatened to write to her uncle.

"Then Onkel Heinrich will put me in a family in Berlin for the winter, and
that will be much nicer for me. And Herr Sung will come to Berlin too."

The Frau Professor began to cry. The tears rolled down her coarse, red,
fat cheeks; and Cacilie laughed at her.

"That will mean three rooms empty all through the winter," she said.

Then the Frau Professor tried another plan. She