For the first time this failed to have an effect. Up to then to be told she looked like her Aunt Bockhügel had always brought her back with a jerk to smiles; even if she had to wrench a smile into position she did so, for the Aunt Bockhügel is the sore point in Edelgard’s family, the spot, the smudge across its brightness, the excrescence on its tree, the canker in its bud, the worm destroying its fruit, the night frost paralyzing its blossoms. She cannot be suppressed. She cannot be explained. Everybody knows she is there. She was one of the reasons that made me walk about my room the whole of the night before I proposed marriage to Edelgard, a prey to doubts as to how far a man may go in recklessness in the matter of the aunts he fastens upon his possible children. The Ottringels can show no such relatives; at least there is one, but she looms almost equal to the rest owing to the mirage created by fogs of antiquity and distance. But Edelgard’s aunt is contemporary and conspicuous. Of a vulgar soul at her very birth, as soon as she came of age she deliberately left the ranks of the nobility and united herself to a dentist. We go there to be treated for toothache, because they take us (owing to the relationship) on unusually favourable terms; otherwise we do not know them. There is however an undoubted resemblance to Edelgard in her less pleasant moods, a thickened, heavier, and older Edelgard, and my wife, well aware of it (for I help her to check it as much as possible by pointing it out whenever it occurs) has been on each occasion eager to readjust her features without loss of time. On this one she was not. Nay, she relaxed still more, and into a profounder likeness. “It’s true,” she said, not even looking at me but staring out of the window; “it’s true about the boots.” “Aunt Bockhügel! Aunt Bockhügel!” I cried softly, clapping my hands. She actually took no notice, but continued to stare abstractedly out of the window; and feeling how impossible it was to talk really naturally to her with Jellaby just outside, I chose the better part and with a movement I could not wholly suppress of impatience got up and left her. Jellaby, as I suspected, was sitting on the ground leaning against one of our wheels as though it were a wheel belonging to his precious community and not ours, hired and paid for. Was it possible that he selected this wheel out of the twelve he could have chosen from because it was my wife’s wheel? “Do you want anything?” he asked, looking up and taking his pipe out of his mouth; and I just had enough self-control to shake my head and hurry on, for I felt if I had stopped I would have fallen upon him and rattled him about as a terrier rattles a rat.