Otto sometimes remembered Galicia.... When a certain look came into
his face it was because he was hearing those terrible machine guns.
He limped slightly, his right knee having been smashed by a ricochet
bullet, and he had had his feet frozen in an Italian prison camp
and lost the toes of the left foot.... Oh, that mountain camp, that
terrible cold, that tiny blanket! If he didn't pull it up about his
shoulders he shivered and shook with that deadly central cold and if
he did pull it up his feet froze. Sometimes he dreamed of it in that
warm bed with Liesel and would awake with a start to find her there,
and drawing the feather-bed up higher would sink again into a blessed
slumber. He knew that he had been lucky.
It was because Liesel was so happy that to her Corinne had first gone
with her plan for Tante Ilde. Liesel had spent summer after summer in
the house at Baden. Her aunt had always spoiled her. Everybody spoiled
Liesel, so evidently made for happiness. As a little girl she was
forever rummaging in the attic for bits of silk and lace for her dolls,
and would turn out the nattiest things. Now for herself she did the
same. She was round-faced, fresh-skinned and smiles played easily about
her somewhat wide, very red mouth;--she would have been attractive in
rags. But she had that peculiar Viennese talent for wearing clothes,
a jaunty manner of pulling her belt in snugly that made the observer
conscious of her very small waist under a full bust, above broad hips,
a way of pressing her hat down upon her head at the most becoming
angle; and her high-heeled shoes were always bright and neatly tied.
These and a lot of other details of an extremely feminine sort added
undeniably to her natural charms. Pauli said that though her soul was
but a centimeter deep, you looked to the bottom through the clearest
of waters. If in her happiness she sometimes forgot other people's
miseries, it was but natural, and when she was reminded she was all
solicitude and self-reproach.
"That will be nice," Tante Ilde was saying slowly after another long
pause, and she was gladder than ever that she had added the knife-rests
and napkin rings to the spoons when Liesel was married. Then as a
sudden thought came to her, she quite brightened up, "I can do the
dishes," she cried, "Liesel always used to hate to do anything that
would spoil her hands."
"Well, she doesn't seem to mind spoiling her hands for Otto," answered
Corinne rather drily.
"They're in love," returned Tante Ilde gently, glimmeringly.
A shadow fell over Corinne's face at the answer as if a ray of
light had been interrupted, or as if something had been muted for a
moment. Her aunt, who was not one to break into silent places, waited
patiently, though she was wondering who and what was coming next.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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