Fanny was both hard and soft-hearted. In her bargains she was merciless. Her beauty and her arrogance were worth wagon loads of that paper money and she knew it. But then how lavishly she could give! For her family she was as a horn of abundance. Indeed Fanny was a sort of clearing house for the relief of their miseries. When you came right down to it she supported in some sort of a way a good half of the less resourceful and more virtuous relatives with whom Providence had so richly endowed her. Without Fanny they would have succumbed to their miseries. Instead of half starving they would have entirely starved. Fanny who hadn't held out, sometimes wondered what on earth would have happened to the others if she had,--Kaethe and the children, Irma's boys, Tante Ilde and a lot more. She wasn't always thinking of them, it is true. But when she was lonely she did it passionately, extravagantly, and would send expensive, ribbon-tied boxes of sweets to Kaethe's children or to the boys. When Maria would find it out she would scold dreadfully and say that what they needed was flour and a lot of it, and that Fanny herself was headed for the poorhouse and Fanny would go off in a huff leaving a hard word behind her for Maria. But then Fanny was like that. All or nothing. Too much or not enough; beyond the goal or short of it. In her avoidance of the middle course lay Fanny's successes and her mishaps. Maria was more reasonable and more constant; but "we can't do everything, too many of them," she would reflect, and "weiss der kuckuk," the cuckoo knows, her favorite expression when in doubt, where they would have got what they did get, if Fanny hadn't been Fanny. The reactions of the various members of the family to her methods had been at first purely temperamental, but according as their misfortunes increased, her spasmodic though continuous generosity had modified their sentiments as well as their miseries. Indeed they were, all of them, in one way or another, continually running beneficently into Fanny, though as she was mostly invisible in the flesh, the "bumps" they got were apt to be of the soft and pleasant order.