Neither of the two women let themselves wonder what her griefs were ... Fanny's griefs.... "I thought tomorrow you would go to some nice little café or just buy something for yourself and eat it at Irma's," continued Corinne lamely for one so generally adequate. "Perhaps another time," answered her aunt with an involuntary gesture of putting the chalice from her as Corinne spoke of Irma. It was her nearest approach to complaint, but Corinne quite knew what it meant. "Except for Carli it hasn't _all_ been too bad?" she questioned entreatingly. "No, no, indeed, truly. Only I've seen so much, Inny," she answered saying the baby name for Corinne, so long unused, "so much of--of human beings," she ended quite detachèdly and her eyes got very wide and wandered a little. "Irma is hard, I know," and Corinne put her hand out to find her aunt's, to hold her attention, "but she has that alcove and I thought, too, it would be a way to help the boys. I'm always worrying about the boys, and then it's almost impossible to find a place to lay one's head." "The foxes of the earth," began Tante Ilde with a still stranger look on her face and then stopped. Corinne was overcome by a quick anguish. Something was hurting her terribly though she couldn't have said which one of many things, and her aunt was suddenly as someone she had never known. Tante Ilde had always had her little phrases and mottoes--but not like that. "Time brings roses," she would say consolingly to any child who was unhappy in the old days. "Hard work in youth is sweet rest in old age," when the boys wouldn't study; and she often reminded the girls that "Beauty goes, but virtue stays." "You're looking so pale, darling, you're not ill, are you?" Corinne asked, after a moment breaking anxiously into that new, disturbing silence. "No, just a little cold, my shoulders ache a bit,--then all the tears," she answered, "nothing more." "Are you warmly enough dressed?" pursued Corinne, after another pause during which her eyes had wandered again to the door. "Oh, yes, I have on two waists," and she smiled weakly. "I believe you're faint for food," said Corinne at last, with a strange, burning look on her face, "we won't wait for Pauli, we'll have our soup right now," and she called the waiter. It was still early and few people were in the restaurant, the waiters mostly standing idly around, smoothing their hair or flicking their serving napkins about as they talked, but it seemed to Frau Stacher an eternity before the order was taken and another endless period till the soup was brought and the waiter poured it hotly, appetizingly from the smoking metal cup into her plate. The first spoonful did its blessed work and the palest shade of pink came into her face. It seemed more delicious than anything she had ever tasted and she pitied all poor creatures who felt as she had been feeling and were not, like her, sitting before a steaming plate of bean soup.