Frau Permaneder, if she had told the truth, would have admitted that
she was not so very glad. She had been living peacefully with her
daughter and granddaughter in Linden Place, and had for society the
house in Fishers’ Lane and her friend Armgard von Maiboom, who had
lived in the town since her husband’s death. Frau Antonie had long
been aware that there was no place for her outside the walls of her
native city. She had her Munich memories, her weak digestion, and
an increasing need of quiet and repose; and she felt not the least
inclination to move to a large city of the united Fatherland, still
less to migrate to another country.
“My dear child,” she said to her daughter, “I must ask you something
very serious. Do you still love your husband with your whole heart?
Would you follow him with your child wherever he went in the wide
world--as, unfortunately, it is not possible for him to remain here?”
And Frau Erica Weinschenk, amid tears that might have meant anything
at all, replied just as dutifully as Tony herself, in similar
circumstances, had once replied to the same question, in the villa
outside Hamburg. So it was necessary to contemplate a parting in the
near future.
On a day almost as dreadful as the day when he had been arrested,
Frau Permaneder brought her son-in-law from the prison, in a closed
carriage, to her house in Linden Place. And there he stayed, after he
had greeted his wife and child in a dazed, helpless way, in the room
that had been prepared for him, smoking from early to late, without
going out, without even taking his meals with his family--a broken
grey-haired man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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