With sandwiches in her pocket and doubt in her heart she went off to shop for the first time in German. Ilse, full of importance, and dressed astonishingly in stockings and new spring garments, sat by her side with an eye to right and left in search of some one to witness her splendour. Herr Dremmel had laid many and strict injunctions on her to take care of her mistress, and in between these wandering glances she did her best by loud inquiries as to Frau Pastor's sensations. Frau Pastor's sensations were those of a perilously jolted woman. She held tight to the hand rail on one side while the Meuk cobbles lasted and to Ilse's arm on the other, and was thankful when the station was reached and she somehow, with a shameful clumsiness, got down out of the high carriage. Incredible to remember that last time she had been at that station she had jumped up into the same carriage as lightly as a bird. She felt humiliated, ashamed of her awkward distorted body. She drew the foolish little cloak and scarf she had put on anxiously about her. People stared. She seemed to be the only woman going to have a child; all the others were free, unhampered, vigorous persons like Ilse. It was as though she had suddenly grown old, this slowness, this fear of not being able to get out of the way of trucks and porters in time. In Königsberg the noise in the streets where the shops were was deafening. All the drays of all the world seemed to be spending that day driving furiously over the stones and tram-lines filled with cases of empty beer bottles or empty milk cans or long, shivering, screaming iron laths, while endless processions of electric-trams rang their bells at them.