defame the character and impugn the
honesty of our future hostess.

"Keep things locked, I warn you, keep them locked!" he repeated
earnestly, all the while cramming books, bottles and garments
promiscuously into a trunk.

We made allowances for his need of reprisal, and took his warning with a
grain of salt; and as a matter of fact our landlady never touched
anything of ours except what she doubtless considered her proper
"commission" levied upon our coal and kerosene. She was quite
satisfactory on the whole, except that she _would_ quarrel very noisily
with her policeman from time to time, or rather he with her. When we
remonstrated and said that we could not stand it and that she shouldn't,
she answered that she would be only too glad to get out of her bargain,
but that she had put her money into this marriage and therefore had to
stay in it!

Her small boy was named Karl, but she always called him "Schweinsche'."
She had a few wisps of greyish drab hair wound round a sort of
steering-wheel of celluloid in the back. On Christmas my sister hunted
for hours for a present for her, and finally returned with a
magnificent set of rhinestone-set haircombs. I have always wondered what
the poor woman did with them, as her hair could not have covered an
eighth of their prongs.

The reason for the summary dismissal of her former tenant was, of
course, the extra money that she made out of our being foreigners who
did not know the tariff, and the fact that there were two of us to be
served. We paid sixty marks, fifteen dollars, a month for the rooms,
service and breakfast of coffee and rolls, and little as this seems, I
don't suppose the doctor had paid a penny over forty. Our colleagues
thought us spendthrifts and gullible foreigners, as they paid about
thirty marks and got their own breakfast.

My sister had two chafing dishes on which she cooked our supper, but the
two o'clock dinner was a problem. I was too tired after the strenuous
morning rehearsals beginning at ten o'clock, and the strain of trying to
follow all the directions I received in German, to go to the Hotels or
restaurants for dinner, as most of my colleagues did. Our landlady
suggested that she should have it fetched from the officers' mess of the
crack cavalry regiment, whose barracks were near by. She said this was a
usual arrangement. We bought a sort of tier of enamelled dishes, fitting
into each other and carried in a kind of wickerwork handle. One
c