ngers, was
a great exhilaration. He was a little disconsolate that no one had come to
meet him, and felt very shy when the porter left him at the front door of
a big white house. An untidy lad let him in and took him into a
drawing-room. It was filled with a large suite covered in green velvet,
and in the middle was a round table. On this in water stood a bouquet of
flowers tightly packed together in a paper frill like the bone of a mutton
chop, and carefully spaced round it were books in leather bindings. There
was a musty smell.

Presently, with an odour of cooking, the Frau Professor came in, a short,
very stout woman with tightly dressed hair and a red face; she had little
eyes, sparkling like beads, and an effusive manner. She took both Philip's
hands and asked him about Miss Wilkinson, who had twice spent a few weeks
with her. She spoke in German and in broken English. Philip could not make
her understand that he did not know Miss Wilkinson. Then her two daughters
appeared. They seemed hardly young to Philip, but perhaps they were not
more than twenty-five: the elder, Thekla, was as short as her mother, with
the same, rather shifty air, but with a pretty face and abundant dark
hair; Anna, her younger sister, was tall and plain, but since she had a
pleasant smile Philip immediately preferred her. After a few minutes of
polite conversation the Frau Professor took Philip to his room and left
him. It was in a turret, looking over the tops of the trees in the Anlage;
and the bed was in an alcove, so that when you sat at the desk it had not
the look of a bed-room at all. Philip unpacked his things and set out all
his books. He was his own master at last.

A bell summoned him to dinner at one o'clock, and he found the Frau
Professor's guests assembled in the drawing-room. He was introduced to her
husband, a tall man of middle age with a large fair head, turning now to
gray, and mild blue eyes. He spoke to Philip in correct, rather archaic
English, having learned it from a study of the English classics, not from
conversation; and it was odd to hear him use words colloquially which
Philip had only met in the plays of Shakespeare. Frau Professor Erlin
called her establishment a family and not a pension; but it would have
required the subtlety of a metaphysician to find out exactly where the
difference lay. When they sat down to dinner in a long dark apartment that
led out of the drawing-room, Philip, feeling very shy, saw t