He had felt a raw twinge of anger as he had opened the door, looking down at the first boards of his room. A half an hour before, on waking, he had sat up in bed and gazed at the crevice at its foot where a letter, thrust underneath by the concierge, usually lay. He had stared as though it had been a shock to find nothing. That little square of rich bright white paper was what he had counted on night to give him—that he had expected to find on waking, as though it were a secretion of those long hours. It made him feel that there had been no night—long, fecund, rich in surprises—but merely a barren moment of sleep. A stale and garish continuation of yesterday, no fresh day at all, had dawned. The chill and phlegmatic appearance of his room annoyed him. It was its inhospitable character that repelled the envelope pregnant with revolutionary joy and serried German marks. Its dead unchangeableness must preclude all innovation. This spell of monotony on his life he could not break. The room cut him off from the world. He gazed around as a man may eye a wife whom he suspects of intercepting his correspondence. There was no reason why the letter with his monthly remittance should have come on that particular morning, already eight days overdue. “If I had a father like yours!” said Suzanne in menacing, humorous sing-song, eyes bulging and head nodding. At this vista of perpetual blackmail she fell into a reverie. “Never get your father off on your fiancée, Suzanne!” Kreisler advised in reply. “Comment?” Suzanne did not understand, and pulled a sour face. “I had a fiancée.” “Oui. Très bien. Tu t’es brouillé avec elle?” “I have quarrelled with her; yes. She married my father. Or I married her, I may say, to my father. That was a mistake.” “I believe you! That, as you say, was careless! You don’t get on well with her?” “I never see her.” “You never go home?” Kreisler was too proud to reply to Suzanne very often. He marched on, staring severely ahead. “How long ago is it that you—how long have you had that stepmother?” “My father married four years ago.” “Married your—girl⸺?” “That’s it.” “And that’s why you have trouble? She makes the trouble. She is at the bottom of the trouble? Ah! You never told me that. Now I understand why. What’s she like? Is she nice?” “Not bad.” They got near the Berne. “Let’s have a cup of coffee,” Kreisler said. Suzanne sat down—with the hiding of her red hands, her guilty lofty silence, eyebrows raised as though with a slimy pescine enamel, inducing an impression of nefarious hurry and impermanence. Kreisler was sour and full of himself. His bag looked as though it should hold the properties or merchandise of some illicit trade or amusement. Suzanne seemed to triumph at this information. She pressed and pressed in breathless undertone, fascinated by something. Family dramas, of all dramas, she had the expertest interest in. “You remember the time I had to send three letters to the old devil⸺?”