hen, to the picture, "Perhaps it's not as bad as it sounds; perhaps
it is just my sensitiveness." In the half light of the drawing-room the
smile seemed to deepen in Anna's portrait, and to become secret, even
cruel. "No," he reflected, "that smile is not at all her happiest
expression--it was a mistake to let her have it taken smiling like that.
She doesn't look like my wife--like the mother of my son." Yes, that
was it, she did not look like the mother of a son who was going to be
a partner in the firm. The picture got on his nerves; he held it in
different lights, looked at it from a distance, sideways, spent, it
seemed to Andreas afterwards, a whole lifetime trying to fit it in.
The more he played with it the deeper grew his dislike of it. Thrice
he carried it over to the fireplace and decided to chuck it behind the
Japanese umbrella in the grate; then he thought it absurd to waste
an expensive frame. There was no good in beating about the bush. Anna
looked like a stranger--abnormal, a freak--it might be a picture taken
just before or after death.

Suddenly he realised that the wind had dropped, that the whole house
was still, terribly still. Cold and pale, with a disgusting feeling that
spiders were creeping up his spine and across his face, he stood in the
centre of the drawing-room, hearing Doctor Erb's footsteps descending
the stairs.

He saw Doctor Erb come into the room; the room seemed to change into a
great glass bowl that spun round, and Doctor Erb seemed to swim through
this glass bowl towards him, like a goldfish in a pearl-coloured
waistcoat.

"My beloved wife has passed away!" He wanted to shout it out before the
doctor spoke.

"Well, she's hooked a boy this time!" said Doctor Erb. Andreas staggered
forward.

"Look out. Keep on your pins," said Doctor Erb, catching Dinzer's arm,
and murmuring, as he felt it, "Flabby as butter."

A glow spread all over Andreas. He was exultant.

"Well, by God! Nobody can accuse ME of not knowing what suffering is,"
he said.

10. THE CHILD-WHO-WAS-TIRED.

She was just beginning to walk along a little white road with tall
black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and
where nobody walked at all, when a hand gripped her shoulder, shook her,
slapped her ear.

"Oh, oh, don't stop me," cried the Child-Who-Was-Tired. "Let me go."

"Get up, you good-for-nothing brat," said a voice; "get up and light the
oven or I'll shake every bone out o