o longer wandered about the little house, commenting
ironically upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a
cigarette hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.

After her mother's death Caroline assumed the management of that
bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste's
pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and
the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste
himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory
of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face
this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly.
The house had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague,
distressing, unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough. Her
mother, thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music
teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the
kitchen range. Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the house
had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant, intangible and
unattainable. The family had lived in successive ebullitions of generous
enthusiasm, in talk of masters and masterpieces, only to come down to
the cold facts in the case; to boiled mutton and to the necessity of
turning the dining-room carpet. All these emotional pyrotechnics had
ended in petty jealousies, in neglected duties, and in cowardly fear of
the little grocer on the corner.

From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and uncertain
existence, with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its poetic ideals and
sordid realities, its indolence and poverty tricked out in paper roses.
Even as a little girl, when vague dreams beset her, when she wanted to
lie late in bed and commune with visions, or to leap and sing because
the sooty little trees along the street were putting out their first
pale leaves in the sunshine, she would clench her hands and go to
help her mother sponge the spots from her father's waistcoat or press
Heinrich's trousers. Her mother never permitted the slightest question
concerning anything Auguste or Heinrich saw fit to do, but from the
time Caroline could reason at all she could not help thinking that many
things went wrong at home. She knew, for example, that her father's
pupils ought not to be kept waiting half an hour while he discussed
Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist over a dish of herrings and a
spotted tableclot