obese, misshapen wine skin! you
bloated, blue-faced sot!" said the woman. "I deserted young Hilsenhoff
for you, Hilsenhoff with his delicate cheeks and his soft yellow hair,
and he is mine and I am his and I will let him out of the box and we
will live together in love, the dear young thing. What if he does
study sometimes? I shall not mind. He need not always sit with me in
love's dalliance."

All at once it came home to her that if Moehrlein maintained the
resuscitation of Hilsenhoff was impossible and charged her with
believing it possible because she wished to believe it so, it might
also be true that he did not believe it possible because he did not
wish to so believe. The burned out eyes that told of dreams of men,
men who these many years had not included her husband, smoldered with
a sudden fire. With a song in her heart, she was up and bustling
about. She filled a brazier with coals and got a frying-pan and
wheat-cake batter, and a razor and a crocheting hook--ah, she knew how
the process of restoring suspended animation was practised. She
lumbered up into the third story with her burdens, into the room where
slept the lodger. Not for fifteen years had anyone looked into that
sleeping chamber. The blinds and curtains, all were drawn, the dust
lay thick under foot. She let in the light of day at every window.
There sat the box in the middle of the floor, hooped with bands of
iron and with the great seal of the University of Bonn stamped upon
the lock. She broke the seal and turned the lock and then sank down in
a sudden faintness of heart. Indeed, how loath she was to put an end
to the dream that had just now filled her whole being with rapture,
and what else would it be but to put an end to it when she delved into
that box? She would go away and let herself dream on a few days more
before putting the matter to its final test, perhaps never doing so.
Thus she reasoned, and yet her hand, as she sat before the box with
averted face, rose as if impelled by the volition of another
intelligence, over the edge of the box, down to the mass of wool and
wadding, through it to the wrappings and swathings in the middle,
through the wrapping, and felt--the thrill of unimaginable joy ran
through her. It was not bones, it was not bones!

Into the room of the lodger came Dr. August Moehrlein. The coals of
the brazier were out, the batter had been turned into cakes, the razor
was covered with hair, four waxen plugs lay by the