She, who had formerly spent so many hours on the sofa, never found a
moment's time to lie down the whole day; she slept all the more soundly
at night as a result. It was quite true what she had heard other women
say: a little child claims its mother's whole attention. Oh, how empty,
colourless those days had been in which she had only existed. It was
only now that there was meaning, warmth, brilliancy in her life.

She walked every day beside the child's perambulator, which the
nurse pushed, and it was a special pleasure to her to wheel the light
little carriage with its white lacquer, gilt buttons and blue silk
curtains herself now and then. How the people stared and turned round
when they saw the handsome perambulator--no, the beautiful child. Her
heart beat with pleasure, and when her flattered ear caught the cries
of admiration, "What a fine child!" "How beautifully dressed!" "What
splendid eyes!"--it used to beat even more quickly, and a feeling of
blissful pride took possession of her, so that she walked along with
head erect and eyes beaming with happiness. Everybody took her to be
the mother, of course, the young child's young mother, the beautiful
child's beautiful mother. How often strangers had already
spoken to her of the likeness: "The exact image of you, Frau Schlieben,
only its hair is darker than yours." Then she had smiled every time and
blushed deeply. She could not tell the people that it really could not
resemble her at all. She hardly remembered herself now that not a drop
of her blood flowed in Woelfchen's veins.

It looked at her the first thing when it awoke. Its little bed with
its muslin curtains stood near the nurse's, but its first look was for
its mother and also its last, for nobody knew how to sing it to sleep
as well as she did.

"Sleep sound, sweetest child,
Yonder wind howls wild.
Hearken, how the rain makes sprays
And how neighbour's doggie bays.
Doggie has gripped the man forlorn
Has the beggar's tatter torn----"

sounded softly and soothingly in the nursery evening after evening,
and little Wolf fell quietly asleep to the sound of it, to the song of
the wind and the rain round defenceless heads, and of beggars whose
garments the dog had torn.

Paul Schlieben had no longer any cause to complain of his wife's
moods. Everything had changed; her health, too, had become new, as it
were, as though a second li