All the same
she lived with her heart and soul in Stettin. A local paper from
Stettin was her only reading. She kept up a regular correspondence with
all her old acquaintances, who gave her news of all the engagements,
marriages, births, and deaths of the rich people she had known. If
Stettin people of good standing came to Berlin she called on them and
invited them to dinner, when her former celebrated triumphs in cookery
were repeated. If she found out that any wealthy inhabitants of Stettin
had been in Berlin without informing her of the fact, she took it so
much to heart that she had to go to bed for a week. A few Stettin
families, who in the course of the year emigrated to the capital,
constituted her circle of visiting acquaintances, enlarged later by
Malvine's school friends, and introductions at their houses. The
connection with the Ellrichs was through the Stettin circle. Frau Brohl
gave a large soiree twice in the course of the winter, when the
invitations they had received were returned. Since Malvine was grown up
there had been dancing, although the small size of the drawing-room,
and the displacement of all Frau Brohl's needlework, set everything in
great confusion.

This kind of life and its surroundings naturally could not develop
Malvine's mind and character in any high degree. She missed any
stimulus from her mother or from her grandmother; she only learned to
respect rich people, to fathom the mysteries of the kitchen, and to
cultivate a taste for peculiar and original fancy work; she was,
however, a good-tempered, rather slow-witted girl, of well-balanced
mind, without a trace of capriciousness or the nervous temperament so
common to city life; within her limited view of things she had a good,
honest intelligence, and with her plump figure and her round, rosy
face, which bore witness to her grandmother's kitchen, she was very
comely in men's eyes.

Paul Haber had already become acquainted with the flat in the
Lutzowstrasse during the winter before the war, and he liked the quiet
he found in the corners of the little rooms, and in the muffled voices
of these three women. The friendship was continued during the war by
means of frequent letters, and on his home-coming Paul renewed his
visits with pleasure. By cautious inquiries he had gathered that
Malvine had sixty thousand thalers in cash as her dowry, and would
inherit double that sum. Her modest, quiet, amiable disposition made
him drift into a s