ead he
had got growing up in his house a small person whom he had to respect,
a manager.

He went off to the town with just as uncomfortable a conscience as
before, and growled in his red beard at womenfolks that put on airs,
whom a man would have to show their place or send to the devil.

Frau Rauchfuss had taken care to provide a capable woman to look after
the house and a bailiff for the estate, so that Beate's inheritance
might be kept in good condition in spite of her light-headed father. In
this plain and thrifty company Herr Rauchfuss was not at all at his
ease. He went on drinking as before; and it was no longer requisite
that it should be the "Elephant" where he washed down his worries and
his ill-temper. Any tavern would do, even up behind the Ettersberg--he
was not so particular. But he still remained a reputable member of
society with his wits about him, behaving with perfect propriety in the
tavern parlor and still proud of his ability to walk and talk straight
after an indefinite number of glasses.

As Beate grew older, she went down every morning at five o'clock in the
milk-wagon to the town, winter and summer, to go to school, and got
down in the Entenfang at Madame Kummerfelden's. The child stayed with
her until school began, had dinner with her at midday, took part in the
famous sewing-class with the other girls under the kind, lively
teacher, and then went home in the wagon when it brought the afternoon
milk.

Good Frau Kummerfelden took a great deal of pleasure in the child's
company--but she had some left over for the father also. When, arrayed
in one of her flowered dresses and a cap tilted up over her still
youthful face, she took her coffee comfortably on Sunday afternoons in
the little house in the Entenfang, it was not at all disagreeable to
her to have the old sinner pass an hour with her. He got two or three
drinks of schnapps, some of the best snuff any nose could wish, and
extra strong coffee, that even a throat as hardened as his could taste
when it went down.

"It's good to see something like a man now and then," she said; "and
Rauchfuss with his red beard and his giant stature and his mighty
stride reminds an old woman like me that there are still men on earth,
which one goes near to forgetting in these endless sewing-classes of
wretched little girls!"

And, to tell the truth, she liked just such an old reprobate. "Yes,"
she said once to her friend, "if the good God were a woman,