Professor Eberhardt went there every day, but with his own physical necessities ever so meagrely provided for, it was pure agony to go back to those rooms where seven hungry children and a pale wife awaited his return. He was always asked what he had had and how it had tasted. He was often able to slip the bread or the zwieback into his pocket, but there was no way of handling the cocoa and beans and rice except to eat them. Kaethe kept his only suit brushed and darned. Indeed it was getting to be one large darn with areas of the original cloth making patterns. She kept him in clean collars too, for a long time, but even at the last, with his coat collar turned up, he had the unmistakable air of a man of learning and a gentleman. He loved his wife and children greatly. But it was a terrible life, a cold, damp, undernourished life, the things of the brain and the spirit slipping farther and farther from his sight. Brawn was indeed what was wanted.... Unless one had that strange, mysterious but apparently essential thing called money,--that some had and some hadn't. Professor Eberhardt had never been fanned, even gently, by any breeze of commercialism.... They had all been so proud of Leo and Kaethe in the old days; sometimes Leo's name was mentioned in the newspapers and though they cared little and knew less about the congresses held in Vienna, they would quickly run their eyes over names and subjects, hunting for Leo's and "as proud as dogs with two tails," according to Hermann, when they discovered it. The plight of Leo and Kaethe and their lovely children kept the two women silent a long time. Just as the thought of Hermann had made them very still.... In fact viewed from any angle, the family fortunes were now apt to engender silence. "Oh yes ... if Fanny ..." said Tante Ilde at last, picking up the thread where they had somewhat charily dropped it, "if Fanny...." She had to concede that going to Kaethe's with something of the old familiar gesture of giving to those she loved rather than receiving from them, when obviously, they had none too much, put Thursday in quite a different light. "What do you think I could get to take them? How much do you think," she paused musingly, "Fanny will send?" "I don't know, but it will be enough. You can look around and see what you can get the most of for the money. There are so many of them," she ended, the familiar phrase losing itself in a sigh.