irrepressible vivacity and sense of freedom pulsed
through her body. It seemed to her lamentable that she should have to
sit down in the overheated, sticky air of the office among all those
clerks, and write.

She went, nevertheless, to the office, took her place among the clerks,
and wrote as usual. Herr Zittel's eyes shone through the lenses of his
spectacles like two poison flasks. But she did not make much progress;
time dragged; it dragged even more heavily and slowly than Herr Diruf's
feet, as he made his rounds through the room. Eleanore looked up. She
felt as if his gloomy eyes were resting on her. Conscious of having
failed to perform her duty as she might have done, she blushed.

Finally the clock struck six. The other clerks left, making much noise
as they did so. Eleanore waited as usual until they had all gone, for
she did not like to mix with them. Just then Benjamin Dorn came wabbling
in: "The Chief would like to speak to Fraeulein Jordan," he said, and
bent his long neck like a swan. Eleanore was surprised: what on earth
could Herr Diruf want with her? Possibly it had to do with Benno.

Alfons Diruf was sitting at his desk as she entered. He wrote one more
line, and then stared at her. There was something in his expression that
drove the blood from her cheeks. Involuntarily she looked down at
herself and felt her flesh creep.

"You wanted to see me," she said.

"Yes, I wanted to see you," he replied, and made a weary attempt to
smile.

There was another pause. In her anxiety Eleanore looked first at one
object in the room and then at another; first at the bathing nymph, then
at the silk curtains, then at the Chinese lampshade.

"Well, sweetheart," said Herr Diruf, his smile gradually changing into a
sort of convulsion, "we are not bad, are we? By the beard of the
prophet, we are all right, aren't we? Hunh?"

Eleanore lowered her head. She thought she had misunderstood him: "You
wanted to see me," she said in a loud voice.

Diruf laid his hand, palm down, on the edge of his desk. His solitaire
threw off actual sparks of brilliancy. "I can crush every one of you,"
he said, as he shoved his hand along the edge of the desk toward
Eleanore. "That boy out there, your brother, is an underhanded sharper.
If I want to I can make him turn a somersault, believe me." He shoved
his fat hand a little farther along, as if it were some dangerous engine
and his solitaire a signal lamp. "I can make the whole pa