ng. So far as it was humanly possible to
determine from her casual remarks, she thoroughly enjoyed her work. She
liked to make out receipts for premiums, lick stamps, copy letters, and
see so many people come in and go out. Stout old Diruf and lanky Zittel
did everything they could to keep her interested, and if, despite their
efforts, it was seen that a morose mood was invading her otherwise
cheerful disposition, they took her out to the merry-go-round, and in a
short time her wonted buoyancy had returned.

She seemed like a child, and yet she was every inch a woman. She
insisted on wearing her little felt cap at a jaunty angle on her blond
hair. When she entered the room, the atmosphere in it underwent a
change; it was easier to breathe; it was fresher. People somehow
disapproved of the fact that her eyes were so radiantly blue, and that
her two rows of perfect white teeth were constantly shining from out
between her soft, peach-like lips. They said she was light-hearted; they
said she was a butterfly. Benjamin Dorn was of the opinion that she was
a creature possessed of the devil of sensuality and finding her
completest satisfaction in earthly finery and frippery. For some time
there had been an affair of an intimate nature between her and Baron von
Auffenberg. Just what it was no one knew precisely; the facts were not
obtainable. But Benjamin Dorn, experienced ferreter that he was, could
not see two people of different sexes together without imagining that he
was an accomplice in the hereditary sin of human kind. And one day he
caught Eleanore alone in the company of Baron von Auffenberg. From that
day on she was, in his estimation, a lost soul.

The fact concerning Eleanore was this: life never came very close to
her. It comes right up to other people, strangles them, or drags them
along with it. It kept its distance from Eleanore, for she lived in a
glass case. If she had sorrow of any kind, if some painfully
indeterminable sensation was gnawing at her soul, if the vulgarity and
banality of a base and disjointed world came her way, the glass case in
which she lived simply became more spacious than ever, and the things
or thoughts that swarmed around it more and more incomprehensible.

One can always laugh if one lives in a glass case. Even bad dreams
remain on the outside. Even longing becomes nothing more than a purple
breath which clouds the crystal from without, not from within.

The people were quite right