after all the way it all started, wasn't it? And when you come to-morrow—I don't want to make it hard for you—why, if you'll only just smile or kiss my hand again as you did this evening when you left, then I'll know. And if things should be different from the way I have been imagining, why, then, just tell me so right out. You needn't let it worry you. Then I'll simply hold out my hand to you, and think to myself that those were lovely hours I spent with you this summer, and that one must not all of a sudden be so immodest as to want to be Frau Doktor or even Frau Direktor. And as a matter of fact I don't care particularly about that last part of it. And now take notice: you can bring along some other wife next year, some beautiful foreigner from Lanzarote, or some American, or even an Australian—but a real one; in any case it is settled that I stand watch over the construction work at the sanitarium, in case this purchase is actually consummated.
"For these are two things that have, at bottom, nothing to do with one another. Well, and now I guess it is really about enough. I am quite curious whether I will actually send you this letter to-morrow morning. What do you think?
"But, farewell. Auf Wiedersehen! I love you and remain, no matter how it may all turn out, your friend, Sabine."
Graesler sat long over this letter. He read it a second and a third time, and even then did not really know whether its contents made him happy or sad. This, at least, was clear: Sabine was willing to be his wife. She was even throwing herself at him, as she herself had put it. But at the same time she explained that it was not love she felt for him. But then, her view of him was altogether too clear-sighted, one might almost say too critical, for that. She had brought out correctly enough that he was squeamish, was vain, cool, undetermined—characteristics, all of them, whose presence in him he did not want in any way to deny, but which Fräulein Sabine would have taken less notice of, and would hardly have emphasized, if he had happened to be ten or fifteen years younger. And he immediately asked himself: if all his faults had not escaped her even from a distance and if in her very first letter she did not forget to underscore them for him, what in Heaven's name would happen later, in close daily intercourse which would be sure to bring many of his other shortcomings to light for her? One would have to
