as Graesler gloomily shook his head and, taking off his stiff black hat, ran his fingers through a shock of coarse, slightly greying blond hair, the director added:
"Oh, my dear Doctor, time works wonders. And if, by any chance, it's solitude you dread in that little white house, why, there's always a remedy for that. Why not bring along a nice little wife from Germany?" And as Graesler responded with a timid stare, the director continued in a lively, almost peremptory fashion:
"Come, come, their name is legion. A nice little blond wife—or, for that matter, a brunette would do—that's very likely the one thing you need to make a complete man of you." Doctor Graesler lifted his eyes reflectively, as though to seek vanishing pictures in the past.
"Well," the director concluded affably, "whatever you decide, one way or the other, single or married, you will be welcome here in any case. And, if you please, by the twenty-seventh of October, as arranged. Otherwise, in view of the steamer-connexions, which, despite all our efforts, are regrettably still rather unsatisfactory, you might not arrive until the tenth of November; and as we open on the first"—and now he assumed the somewhat twangy accents of the army-lieutenant which the doctor found totally intolerable—"that really would hardly suit us."
He shook the doctor's hand with an excessive show of heartiness—a habit he had brought with him from the United States—exchanged a hasty greeting with a passing ship's-officer, hurried down the steps, and was shortly to be seen walking down the gang-plank, whence he again nodded a good-bye to the doctor who stood rather dejectedly, hat in hand, against the deck-rail. A few minutes later the steamer made clear of the shore.
On the trip home, which was favoured by beautiful weather, Doctor Graesler often recalled the parting words of the director. And afternoons, when, with his Scotch plaid steamer-rug spread over his knees, he slumbered gently in his comfortable deck-chair on the promenade, there sometimes appeared to him, like a vision, a plump, attractive woman in white summer-clothes, gliding about through the house and in the garden—a pink-cheeked woman with a doll's face which he seemed somehow to know, not actually, but perhaps from some picture-album or some illustrated family-magazine. This creature of his dreams possessed, however, the mysterious
