He took to peering anxiously at unimportant parts of me such as my nails, and was startled to see them often black. He caught me once or twice red-eyed in corners, when it had happened that the dear ways and pretty looks of my darling mother had come back for a moment with extra vividness. He decided that I was both dirty and wretched, and argued, I am sure during sleepless nights, that I would probably go on being dirty and wretched for ever. And so he put on his best clothes one day, and set out doggedly in search of a wife. He found her quite easily, in a house in the next street. She was making doughnuts, for it was the afternoon of New Year's Eve. She had just taken them out of the oven, and they were obviously successful. Papa loves doughnuts. His dinner had been uneatable. The weather was cold. She took off her apron, and piled them on a dish, and carried them, scattering fragrance as they went, into the sitting-room; and the smell of them was grateful; and they were very hot. Papa came home engaged. 'I am not as a rule in favor of second marriages, Rose-Marie,' he began, breaking the news to me with elaborate art. 'Oh, horrid things,' I remarked, my arm round his neck, my face against his, for even then I was as tall as he. You know how he begins abruptly about anything that happens to cross his mind, so I was not surprised. He rubbed his nose violently. 'I never knew anybody with such hair as yours for tickling a person,' he said, trying to push it back behind my ears. Of course it would not go. 'Would it do that,' he added suspiciously, 'if it were properly brushed?' 'I don't know. Well, _Papachen_?' 'Well what?' 'About second marriages.' He had forgotten, and he started. In an instant I knew. I took my arm away quickly, but put it back again just as quickly and pressed my face still closer: it was better we should not see each other's eyes while he told me. 'I am not, as a rule, in favor of them,' he repeated, when he had coughed and tried a second time to induce my hair to go behind my ears, 'but there are cases where they are--imperative.' 'Which ones?' 'Why, if a man is left with little children, for instance.' 'Then he engages a good nurse.' 'Or his children run wild.' 'Then he gets a severe aunt to live with him.' 'Or they grow up.' 'Then they take care of themselves.' 'Or he is an old man left with, say, one daughter.' 'Then she would take care of him.' 'And who would take care of her, Rose-Marie?' 'He would.' 'And if he is an incapable? An old person totally unable to notice lapses from convention, from social customs? If no one is there to tell her how to dress and how to behave? And she is growing up, and yet remains a barbarian, and the day is not far distant when she must go out, and he knows that when she does go out Jena will be astounded.' 'Does the barbarian live in Jena?' 'My dear, she is universal. Wherever there is a widower with an only female child, there she is.'