But, thank goodness, now they were at home. And everything was arranged as quickly as if by magic. True, the comfortable house they had had before was let, but there was villa after villa in the Grunewald, and, as they required so much more room now, they moved into one of those. They rented it to begin with. Later on they would no doubt buy it, as it was quite impossible to take a child like this one into a town. It would have to have a garden. They called him Wolfgang. "Wolf" had something so concise, vigorous, energetic about it, and--Kate gave a slight happy shudder as she thought of it--it was like a secret memory of the Venn, of that desolate spot over which they had triumphed, and to which they made only this slight concession. And did not "Woelfchen"--if they made that the diminutive of Wolf--sound extremely affectionate? "Woelfchen"--the young mother said it about a hundred times every day. The young mother? Oh yes, Kate felt young. Her child had made her young again, quite young. Nobody would have taken her for thirty-five, and she herself least of all. How she could run, how she could fly upstairs when they said: "The child is awake. It's screaming for its bottle." She, who had formerly spent so many hours on the sofa, never found a moment's time to lie down the whole day; she slept all the more soundly at night as a result. It was quite true what she had heard other women say: a little child claims its mother's whole attention. Oh, how empty, colourless those days had been in which she had only existed. It was only now that there was meaning, warmth, brilliancy in her life. She walked every day beside the child's perambulator, which the nurse pushed, and it was a special pleasure to her to wheel the light little carriage with its white lacquer, gilt buttons and blue silk curtains herself now and then. How the people stared and turned round when they saw the handsome perambulator--no, the beautiful child. Her heart beat with pleasure, and when her flattered ear caught the cries of admiration, "What a fine child!" "How beautifully dressed!" "What splendid eyes!"--it used to beat even more quickly, and a feeling of blissful pride took possession of her, so that she walked along with head erect and eyes beaming with happiness. Everybody took her to be the mother, of course, the young child's young mother, the beautiful child's beautiful mother. How often strangers had already spoken to her of the likeness: "The exact image of you, Frau Schlieben, only its hair is darker than yours." Then she had smiled every time and blushed deeply. She could not tell the people that it really could not resemble her at all. She hardly remembered herself now that not a drop of her blood flowed in Woelfchen's veins. It looked at her the first thing when it awoke. Its little bed with its muslin curtains stood near the nurse's, but its first look was for its mother and also its last, for nobody knew how to sing it to sleep as well as she did.