The crowd was thickly waiting at the stopping place. In the rush for seats as the trolley slowed down, she was pushed frighteningly but fortunately along and up the high step and in a second found herself sitting, breathless and hidden between a man with a large sack of something that had, to the eager eyes of the other occupants, the interesting appearance of flour, and a pale young woman with a spindle-legged, big-eyed child of four or five in her arms. In her sympathy with the young mother and the doomed child and her relief at being seated Frau Stacher forgot her hunger and her fatigue and delivered herself up to the delightful sensation of being borne clangingly, powerfully along. She descended quite lightly at the crowded stopping place, though she was jostled and jammed again by the crowd fighting to get in. Crossing over she turned into a grey little street and entering a sombre doorway went up to the apartment where Anna was awaiting her husband and her aunt. There was an air of expectancy about the room as Frau Stacher entered that somewhat relieved its terrible dullness. On the table was a fresh, fine linen cloth, from the days of comfort, and four places were set; a bottle of pale Tokay, like a streak of sunlight caught the eye. There was something sadly festive about it. "I thought it was Pauli when I heard you outside in the hall," were Anna's words as she opened the door. But her aunt accepted the vicarious greeting without indeed noticing it. They all knew about Anna. That was the way she was. Her heavy dark hair that Tante Ilde had once so faithfully brushed back into beauty was braided in a thick braid and twisted twice around her head; but when you had said that about Anna, that was all there was to be remarked. The rest was long, faded, shadowy. From those once noticeably broad, fine shoulders, now simply gaunt, her thin breast fell away into her flat waist above her bony hips. There was not one single thing about Anna Birbach to cause anyone to suspect that she belonged to a smiling, art-loving, easy-going, fatalistic race, with something of the West and much of the East in its make-up. Indeed the broad highway that leads east from the city is the straight road to the Orient, is already the Orient. Something only vaguely diagnosable, but highly-colored, slips in through that Eastern Gate to tint more deeply the Viennese population, a happy enough mixture when only a tenth of them, not nine-tenths, are starving. Hunger there has always been in Vienna. Even in the days of plenty there were thousands who, palely shadowing the street corners had nothing,--the bare, spectral want of the East without its sun and leisure.... Hermine was in the kitchen. She had no more knack at cooking than her mother, but the War had caught her in her earliest youth and the Peace had taught her a few lessons of culinary survival,--though her omelettes would always be hard and her pancakes tough.