permit himself this gesture? Rush off? Off, immediately, take the very next steamer to Lanzarote? Or back—to Sabine? To the creature with the pure soul? Hm! Who knows how life would have shaped itself for her if, at a given moment, she had met the right man—not merely some audacious tenor or some low-spirited practitioner of medicine.
He arose and sought out for lunch the fashionable restaurant where he would not be bothered by the shop-talk of young colleagues, as he had been yesterday. As to the rest, everything else could be decided upon later.
X
He had hardly sat down at his desk that afternoon and opened the anatomical atlas which happened to be lying there, when there was a knock on the door and there entered the compositor's wife, who had announced herself willing to take care of his bachelor's quarters for him. After many apologies she asked him whether he might be so kind as to make her a present of some piece or other of clothing from the wardrobe of his sister, so unhappily deceased. Graesler frowned. "This woman," he said to himself, "would not have dared to make such an almost shameless demand of me, if she did not happen to know that I have been receiving a female visitor here in my lodgings." He answered evasively that he intended to abide by the wishes of his dead sister and turn over her estate, for the most part, to charitable institutions; thus, since he had not as yet found time even to have a look at what there was, for the present he could make no promise whatever. It developed that the woman had in any event brought along the key to the garret; she handed it over to the doctor with an officious smile, thanked him as extravagantly as though he had already fulfilled her request, and withdrew. Since the key was in his hands, Graesler thought, and as he was really glad to have come upon a way of passing the next few empty hours, he determined to pay a visit to the garret, which he had not seen since his childhood days. He climbed the wooden stairs, opened the door, and stepped into a crowded room which was so poorly illuminated by the slanting skylight that Graesler could only gradually find his way about. Superfluous and forgotten household furniture stood in the dusky corners, but the middle was filled
