Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. AnstrutherVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
British -- Germany -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Germany -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
There are, however, certain difficulties in the way. Our house has two
bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, an attic, a kitchen, and a coal-hole.
Johanna inhabits the attic. One sitting-room is sacred to Papa and his
work. The other is a scrap room in which we have our meals and receive
Frau von Lindeberg when she calls, and I write letters and read books
and darn stockings. Where, then, will Joey sleep? The answer is as clear
as daylight and very startling: Joey must sleep with Papa. Now that this
truth has dawned upon me I spend hours lost in thoughts of things like
screens and dividing curtains, besides preparing elaborate speeches for
the bringing of Papa to reason. He himself was the first to declare we
must positively take in a young man again, and he surely will see, when
it is pointed out to him, that any one we have must sleep at the
intervals appointed by nature. I'm afraid he'll see it in the case of
every one except the fruitful Joey. It is most unfortunate that Joey
should be so foolish about Goethe, for we really do want somebody who
doesn't mind about money, and I remember several poor boys in the past
who were so very poor that on the days when my step-mother demanded
payment I used to have to go out early and wander among the hills till
evening, unable to endure the sound of the thalers being wrung out of
them. Oh, money is the most horrid of all necessities. I am ashamed to
think of the many bright hours of life soiled by anxieties about it, by
meannesses about it. Wherever even a question of it arises Love and the
Graces fly affrighted, followed closely, by the entire troop of equally
terrified Muses, out of the nearest window. I detest it. I do not want
it. But with all my defiance of it I am crushed beneath the yoke of the
penny as completely as everybody else. Well do I know that penny, and
how much it is when there's one over, and what worlds away when there's
one too few.
Here comes Johanna to lay the dinner. We are rankly vegetarian again,
Papa leading the way with immense determination, for he has set his
heart at this unfortunate juncture on a new biography of Goethe that
must needs come out just now, a big thing in two volumes costing a
terrible number of marks, very well done, full of the result of original
digging among archives; but he dare not buy it, he says, in the present
state of our affairs. 'Dost thou not think, Rose-Marie,' he said, his
face in grievous puckers at the prospect, 'that a renewed and careful
course of herbage may quickly-set the matter right?'
'Not quickly,' said I, shaking my head, and pondering privately what,
exactly, he meant by the word renewed.
He looked crestfallen.
'But ultimately,' I said, wishing to cheer him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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