He was a man of forty years. Short-legged and chubby, he wore a wide-open coat of brown frieze and a light flowered waistcoat which covered the gentle protuberant curve of his stomach and supported a gold watch-chain with a whole bouquet of charms made of horn, bone, silver, and coral. His trousers were of an indefinite grey-green colour and too short. The material must have been extraordinarily stiff, for the edges stood out in a circle around the legs of his short, broad boots. He had a bullet head, untidy hair, and a stubby nose, and the light-blond curly moustache drooping over his mouth made him look like a walrus. By way of contrast, the imperial between his chin and his underlip stood out rather bristly. His cheeks were extremely fat and puffy, crowding his eyes into two narrow light-blue cracks with wrinkles at the corners. The whole face looked swollen and had a funny expression of fierceness, mingled with an almost touching good nature. Directly below his tiny chin a steep line ran into the white neck-cloth: his goiterous neck could not have endured a choker. In fact, the whole lower part of his face and his neck, the back of his head, his cheeks and nose, all ran rather formlessly in together. The whole skin of the face was stretched to an immoderate tightness and showed a roughness at the ear-joinings and the sides of the nose. In one of his short fat white hands the visitor held his stick; in the other his green Tyrolese hat, decorated with a chamois beard. The Frau Consul had taken off her glasses and was still rising from her sofa-pillow. “What can I do for you?” she asked politely but pointedly. The gentleman, with a movement of decision, laid his hat and stick on the lid of the harmonium. He rubbed his free hands with satisfaction and looked at the Frau Consul out of his kindly, light-blue eyes. “I beg the gracious lady’s pardon for the card,” he said. “I had no other by me. My name is Permaneder--Alois Permaneder, from Munich. Perhaps you might have heard my name from your daughter.” He said all this in a puzzling dialect with a rather loud, coarse voice; but there was a confidential gleam from the cracks of his eyes, which seemed to say: “I’m sure we understand each other already.” The Frau Consul had now risen entirely and went forward with her hand outstretched and her head inclined in greeting. “Herr Permaneder! Is it you? Certainly my daughter has spoken of you. I know how much you contributed to make her visit in Munich pleasant and entertaining. And so some wind has blown you all the way up here?” “That’s it; you’re just right there,” said Herr Permaneder. He sat down by the Frau Consul in the arm-chair which she gracefully indicated to him, and began to rub his short round thighs comfortably with both hands. “I beg your pardon?” asked the Frau Consul. She had not understood a single word of his remark. “You’ve guessed it, that’s the point,” answered Herr Permaneder, as he stopped rubbing his knees.