Corinne was a tall, small-headed, blond woman with a finely-arched nose and shell-like ears lying close to her head. Between her very blue eyes with a recurring oblique look that could veil her thoughts more effectually than dropped lids, was a slanting line that of late had perceptibly deepened. "Very distinguished," was always said of Corinne in the family; always, too, that she was "different," not quite indeed of their own easy-going, somewhat irresponsible Viennese kind which knows so well, in a somewhat unanalytical way, how to get something out of life,--with half a chance, with a quarter of a chance. So little was really needed for happiness with a basis of enough to eat. Humming a new waltz, remodelling a pair of sleeves, getting hold of a bit of fat or sugar for the women; for the men sitting in a warm café drinking beer or black coffee, turning over the _Lustige Blätter_, smoking a Trabuco or a Virginia,--joy was still as easy as that when momentarily far enough from the abyss not to be dizzy and sick with the fear of falling in. Corinne had had in common with Fanny a North German grandmother and though that explained, in a way, a lot of things, still there remained something about her that the family hadn't been able to label satisfactorily. Sometimes they called it cold, sometimes hard, they had all come up against it in one way or another in those days of elemental issues, but terribly clever, they conceded that. She could generally be counted on to find some little door in the thickest wall. Since their father's death and the consequent breaking up of the home, Corinne had been safely, solidly and enviably, it seemed to the rest of them, employed in the Depositen Bank, whose personnel even in those uncertain days, was not doing badly; an expanding wage as the times demanded and at a place run by the bank an eatable midday meal at a possible price. If it had been a matter of her aunt Ilde alone, Corinne could have managed, after a fashion, to keep that existence, so dear to her, from falling to pieces, though what she earned was not yet enough for two; but all whose heads were above water had not one but many drowning persons clinging tightly, stranglingly about their necks. Corinne was conscious of a finally sinking sensation as she proceeded to unfold the plan which appeared to her more and more what it really was--a last monstrous attack on her aunt's existence--pushing it nearer and nearer to the fatal edge. She had no single illusion as to what she was doing, and her voice was very soft in contrast to the hard, stark meaning of her words. "I've spoken to them all, darling, you don't have to do a thing about it. Tomorrow you are to move to Irma's. It will be a sort of combination arrangement. You'll be paying, of course. It's a way to help Irma and the boys as well."