s and caressed it. Its name was
Zephyr. It accompanied her wherever she went.

Daniel threw himself on a chair and looked at the lamp. Zingarella,
standing before the mirror, stroked the cat. Gazing distractedly into
space, she remarked that the manager had discharged her because the
public was no longer satisfied with her work.

"Is this what you call the public?" asked Daniel, who never once took
his eyes from the lamp, just as Anna Siebert kept hers rigidly fixed on
the desolate distances of the mirror. "These fathers of families who
side-step every now and then, these counter-jumpers, the mere looks of
whom is enough to snatch your clothing from your body, this human filth
at the sight of which God must conceal His face in shame--this is what
you call the public?"

"Well, however that may be," Anna Siebert continued in a colourless
voice, "the manager rushed into my dressing room, threw the contract at
my feet, and said I had swindled him. How on earth could I have swindled
him? I am no prima donna and my agent had told him so. You can't expect
a Patti on twenty marks a week. In Elberfeld I got twenty-five, and a
year ago in Zuerich I even drew sixty. Now he comes to me and says he
doesn't need to pay me anything. What am I to live off of? And you've
got to live, haven't you, Zephyr," said Anna as she picked up the cat,
pressed its warm fur to her cheek, and repeated, "You've got to live."

She let her arms fall to her sides, the cat sprang on the floor, hunched
up its back, wagged its tail, and purred. She then went up to Daniel,
fell on her knees, and laid her head on his side. "I have reached the
end," she murmured in a scarcely audible voice, "I am at the end of all
things."

The snow beat against the window panes. With an expression on his face
as though his own thoughts were murdering each other, Daniel looked into
the corner from which Zephyr's yellowish eyes were shining. The muscles
of his face twitched like a fish on being taken from the hook.

And as he cowered in this fashion, the poor girl pressed against his
body, his shoulders lowered, past visions again arose from the depths of
the sea. First he heard a ravishing arpeggio in A-flat major and above
it, a majestic theme, commanding quiet, as it were, in sixteenth triads.
The two blended, in _forte_, with a powerful chord of sevens. There was
a struggling, a separating, a wandering on, and out of the subdued
pianissimo there arose and floated in s