Whenever Frau Stacher entered that room she was confronted by a quite flashy portrait of her mother in the Winterhalter style. It had been sent to Kaethe's for safe-keeping and now hung frameless on the wall. A dealer at the time she sold her furniture had offered her a surprising and unrefusable price for the frame. The young face that looked out at the aging daughter, though like her in many ways, had a point of competent malice in the wide, blue eyes, that was neither in her daughter's eyes nor in her heart. Sometimes, too, from under that broad, floppy, rose-trimmed hat with the long, pink streamers she seemed to look reproachfully, severely at her daughter,--leaving her elegant prettiness thus unset in so cold a world. Frau Stacher had never felt easy about selling that frame, and she sometimes had useless little night thoughts, or equally useless morning thoughts of getting another. But it had been hanging just like that since she gave up the house in Baden, near an enlarged photograph, (whose pressed wood frame picked out with gilt no one had wanted) of the departed Commercial Advisor. She would gladly have been unfaithful to the memory of her husband, now become exceedingly hazy anyway, and replaced his image by that of her mother. But her mother's portrait was square, and his photograph unprophetically had been taken in oblong form. Things were like that now. Nothing fitted.... Kaethe got up a moment after her aunt had greeted her and laid the sleeping baby in a battered crib in the next room, filled with beds of all sizes and sorts. _That_ child was nourished. She would have felt quite exhausted herself, but for the thought of the dinner Tante Ilde had brought. She was still a handsome woman, in the early thirties,--even treading up that Calvary to which every road she knew now lead her, those seven roads of anguish for her seven children and for Leo whom she adored. Once, not indeed so long before, she had been softly, sweetly alight with a kindly inner warmth, that flamed easily, attractively in her face, in those sparkling eyes, in those bright cheeks, hanging about that wide, red-lipped mouth with its irregular white teeth. And then those quick, generous, outward gestures! Now that soft fire was banked and her movements were often listless. But as she stood by the kitchen table, she became animated even gay, because of that natural gift which neither time, nor wars, nor miseries could quite destroy, and clapped her hands, as her aunt had known she would, and talked about the great feast they were going to have. The water was boiling and bubbling forecasting near, delicious moments and Tante Ilde had begun to grate the cheese which was sending up its sharp, appetizing odor.