s views. If public life has rejected him, he goes to the cafe,
where he is sure to find a congenial element.

One day Theresa got up from the bed where she had spent fifteen unbroken
months, and seemed all of a sudden completely recovered. The physician
said it was the strangest case that had ever come under his observation.
But Jason Philip said: "It is the triumph of a good constitution." With
that he went to the cafe, drank beer, made fiery political speeches, and
played skat.

But Theresa left her bed not as a woman forty-six years old--that was
her age--but as a woman of seventy. She had only a few sparsely
distributed grey hairs left on her square head, her face was full of
wrinkles, her eye was hard and cold. From that time on, however, she did
not seem to age. She did not quarrel any more, attended to her affairs
in a straightforward, self-assured way, and observed her increasing
impoverishment with unexpected calm.

She lived on herring, potatoes, and coffee; it was the same diet on
which Philippina and Markus lived, with the one exception that Markus,
as the child nearest her heart, was allowed a piece of sugar for his
coffee. Jason Philip was also put on a diet: he never dared open his
mouth about it, either.

Philippina stood it for a while in silence; finally she said to her
mother: "I can't stand this chicory brew forever."

"Then you'll have to lap up water, you will," replied Theresa.

"No, I won't," said Philippina. "I am going to hire out."

"Well, hire out. Who cares? It'll be one mouth less to feed." "Your
daughter is going to hire out," said Theresa to her husband, when he
came home that evening.

Jason Philip had been playing cards that day, and had lost. He was in a
terrible humour: "She can go plumb to the Devil so far as I am
concerned." That was his comment.

The next morning Philippina sneaked up to the attic, and drew out her
cash from the hole in the chimney: it amounted to nine hundred and forty
marks, mostly in gold, which she had exchanged in the course of years
for small coins. Through the opening in the wall the June sun fell upon
her face, which, never young and bearing the stamp of extended crime,
looked like that of a witch.

She put the money in a woollen stocking, rolled it up in a knot, stuffed
it down her corset between her breasts, made the sign of the cross, and
repeated one of her drivelling formulas. Her clothes, ribbons, and other
possessions she had already pack