Wonderful!--
but wonderful!" He laughed an unmusical and mirthless
laugh.
"But--don't you like it?" I asked, like a simpleton.
Frau Nirlanger seemed to shrink before our very eyes,
so that the pretty gown hung in limp folds about her.
I stared, fascinated, at Konrad Nirlanger's cruel
face with its little eyes that were too close together
and its chin that curved in below the mouth and out again
so grotesquely.
"Like it?" sneered Konrad Nirlanger. "For a young
girl, yes. But how useless, this belated trousseau.
What a waste of good money! For see, a young wife I do
not want. Young women one can have in plenty, always.
But I have an old woman married, and for an old woman the
gowns need be few--eh, Frau Orme? And you too, Frau
Knapf?"
Frau Knapf, crimson and staring, was dumb. There
came a little shivering moan from the figure crouched in
the corner, and Frau Nirlanger, her face queerly withered
and ashen, crumpled slowly in a little heap on the floor
and buried her shamed head in her arms.
Konrad Nirlanger turned to his wife, the black look
on his face growing blacker.
"Come, get up Anna," he ordered, in German. "These
heroics become not a woman of your years.
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