rich people,
she is pampering some grief _de luxe_; don't disturb her!"

Dorothea was docile.

They were playing Beethoven's spring sonatas, when the altercation began
out in the vestibule. The maid came in and whispered something to her
mistress. The Baroness arose and went to the door. Dorothea laid her
violin in her lap, and looked around in affected astonishment, as though
she were coming out of a dream.

At a sign from the Baroness the old servant gave Herr Carovius a free
path. He went in: his face was red; he made a quite ridiculous bow. His
eyes drank in the velvet portieres, the cut glass mirrors, the crystal
vases, and the bronze statuettes. In the meantime, and without fail, he
had placed his right hand against his hip, giving the fine effect of
right akimbo, and set one foot very elegantly a trifle more to the fore
than the other: he looked like a provincial dancing-master.

He complained of the presumptuousness of the servants, and assured the
Baroness that she was in complete enjoyment of his deference. He spoke
of his good intentions and the pressure of circumstances. When the
impatient bearing of his sole but distinguished auditor at last obliged
him to come to the real purpose of his visit, the Baroness twitched; for
from his flood of words there emerged, as she heard them, nothing but
the name of her son.

With panting sounds she came up to Herr Carovius, and took him by the
coat-sleeve. Her dim, black eyes became as round as little bullets; the
supplicating expression in them was so much balm to the soul of her
visitor.

Herr Carovius was enchanted; he was having the time of a scurvy life; he
became impudent; he wanted to take vengeance on the mother against the
son. He saw that the Baroness did not correspond to the picture he had
made of a creature who belonged to the aristocracy. In his imagination
she had lived as a domineering, imperious, inaccessible phenomenon: and
now there stood before him an old, obese, worried woman. On this account
he gave his voice a shriller tone, his face a more scurrilous expression
than was his wont. Then he launched forth on a graphic narration of the
unhappy plight in which he now found himself as a result of his
association with Baron von Eberhard, Jr.

He claimed that it was nothing but his own good nature that had got him
into this trouble. And yet, what was he to do? The Baron would have
starved to death, or become morally depraved, if he had not come t