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olive-green or eaude Nil dress. She liked everything “to be echoed.” If, for instance, the sash was black, then she found it absolutely necessary to have some little black fringe or little black frill about her throat. In the first years of our married life she used to wear linen with Swiss embroidery. She was perfectly capable of putting on a wispy frock together with thick autumn shoes; no, decidedly, she had not the faintest notion of the mysteries of harmony, and this was connected with her being wretchedly untidy. Her slovenliness showed in the very way she walked, for she had a knack of treading her left shoe down at heel.
    It made me shudder to glance into her chest of drawers where there writhed higgledy-piggledy a farrago of rags, ribbons, bits of silk, her passport, a wilted tulip, some pieces of moth-eaten fur, sundry anachronisms (gaiters for example, as worn by girls ages ago) and suchlike impossible rubbish. Quite often, too, there would dribble into the cosmos of my beautifully arranged things some tiny and very dirty lace handkerchief or a solitary stocking, torn. Stockings seemed positively to burn on those brisk calves of hers.
    Not a jot did she understand of household matters. Her receptions were dreadful. There would always be, in a little dish, broken bars of milk chocolate as offered in poor provincial families. I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe for the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember, once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clasped her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured:“Oh, Hermann.…” It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe.
    With, perhaps, the ill-defined feeling that by further embellishing the image of the man she loved, I was meeting her halfway, and doing her and her happiness a good turn, I took advantage of her confidence and during the ten years we lived together told her such a heap of lies about myself, my past, my adventures, that it would have been beyond my powers to hold it all in my head, always ready for reference. But she used to forget everything. Her umbrella stayed with all our acquaintances in turn; her lipstick turned up in incomprehensible places such as her cousin’s shirtpocket; the thing she had read in the morning paper would be told me at night somewhat as follows: “Let me see, where did I read it, and
what was
it exactly? … I just had it by the tail—oh, please, do help me!” Giving her a letter to post was equal to throwing it into the river, leaving the rest to the acumen of the stream and the recipient’s piscatorial leisure.
    She mixed dates, names, faces. After having invented something I never returned to it; she soon forgot, the story sank to the bottom of her consciousness, but there remained on the surface the ever-renewed rings of humble wonder. Her love almost crossed the boundary limiting all the rest of her feelings. On certain nights, when June and moon rhymed, her most settled thoughts turned into timid nomads. It did not last, they did not wander far, the world was locked again; and a very simple world it was, with the greatest complication in it amounting to a search for the telephone number which she had jotted down on one of the pages of a library book, borrowed by the very person whom she wished to ring up.
    She was plump, short, rather formless, but then pudgywomen alone rouse me. I simply have no use for the long young lady, the scrawny flapper, the proud smart whore who struts up and down Tauentzienstrasse in her shiny tight-laced boots. Not only had I always been eminently satisfied with my meek bedmate and her cherubic charms, but I had noticed lately, with