e future should ask his advice before any
undertaking. This Marker felt as a deep humiliation, and rather than
submit to Brohl's tyranny, preferred to loaf all day with his hands in
his pockets at the Exchange, and shortened the evenings by going to the
club, and boring people with endless stories of the meanness and
thick-headedness of his cad of a father-in-law, who in his
old-fashioned, narrow-minded Philistinism had not the least capacity
for any great undertakings.

Brohl died soon after, and Marker experienced a new and painful
sensation. His wife did not inherit a penny by her father's will, his
whole property under limited conditions going to the widow. This was
specially arranged for by Brohl to prevent Marker from laying his hands
on more capital. He shook his fist at the opening of the will, and
broke out into unseemly abuse; he went all over Stettin, and cried out
that he was robbed, that the old rascal had plundered him. To his wife
and mother-in-law he also talked day after day and night after night,
saying how shamefully he had been treated, and that it was his
mother-in-law's duty to make good the mistake. Frau Marker could not
endure this perpetual grumbling and badgering, and Frau Brohl became
weak with not only her son-in-law but her daughter constantly at her
ear. She consented to give him a large sum to put him into a new
business, which he described as having a brilliant and unfailing
future, and after a great deal of begging and worrying she at length
brought herself to the far greater sacrifice of a removal to Berlin,
that Marker might have a greater sphere for his energies. So the
stately house in the Frauenstrasse with its lofty rooms was abandoned,
and exchanged for the small flat in Berlin.

The departure from Stettin was a miserable one. It was desperate work
packing the thousand things which had gathered together during the
quarter of a century in careless profusion. It was heart-breaking to be
obliged to leave behind the stores of wood, coal, and potatoes in the
cellar, the cranberry jam in the storeroom, which the Markers, in their
grandeur of ideas, did not think worth the trouble of taking with them!
And the farewell visits to the rich friends, in whose family festivals
she would never more take part; and the last visit to the Jacobkirche,
where she would never more go on Sundays and meet her intimate friends,
for whose benefit she wore the family ornaments, and the stiff silk
dress.