Tante Ilde was indeed making things easier, suaver; Tante Ilde was really an alabaster box of precious ointment, broken anew each time she went into one of those homes not hers, diffusing sweet odors about her. They would mostly, (perhaps not Pauli), have thought: "It's poor old Tante Ilde and we've got to do something for her," not dreaming that all the time it was she who was doing something priceless for them. Now he was in a fever of longing to hear a beloved name. But she told them first about Liesel and Otto, everything she could without making Anna jealous; not, of course, about the sausage. Meat twice a day would have scandalized Anna, and anyway Tante Ilde would never have been guilty of the indelicacy of speaking about that sausage, wrapped up and put away too. The fresh noodles in fresh butter were all that Anna and Hermine could really stand; they would talk about them for days; but she described in detail the package from the "Friends" at which Anna and Hermine pricked up their big ears and cried: "You don't say!" and Hermine ran and got an inch-long pencil and a piece of newspaper and wrote the address on the margin. Then she and her mother nodded their heads significantly at each other. They were both thinking that Irma should have let them know immediately, and that some afternoon late, when it was dark and they wouldn't be seen, they'd go for one of those packages.... As Tante Ilde was talking Pauli noticed the white lace about her neck and how genteel she contrived to look in spite of age and disaster. Then his eyes travelled to his daughter, seeing her really for the first time that day. Hermine had on a chocolate-colored dress with trimmings of an unpleasant blue. Pauli turned his eyes again to Tante Ilde's cameo face, from which the broad eyes seemed to look out more and more bluely as the dinner went on. Pleasure, even a little, was apt to put the color back into her eyes. Then he looked again at his daughter. He was thinking that the devil could take him if he knew what color would be becoming to his only child. Something, anything to emphasize her, to put her on the chart, so he followed out his natural taste as he said: "I must give you a new dress, Hermine, pink or red or a good bright blue?" Hermine was delighted at this mark of paternal affection and Anna astonished. When a long time after he saw the hard and vapid blue she chose he was finally and forever discouraged. No, Hermine had no flair, she always went wrong on colors, like Anna. His wife and daughter were beyond Pauli. Just those two women out of all Vienna he could rightfully go home to; Hermine was even named for his mother. "Na, dos ist kein Leben," it's no life, he often thought in his broadest, most expressive Viennese. Pauli who could speak perfectly half a dozen languages, always chose that in which to clothe satisfactorily certain unsatisfactory thoughts.