The Song of Songs

It happened in this way. He had been giving piano lessons the whole day, in the interim swearing and drinking Moselle and Selters, for it was intensely hot. Occasionally he had...

Good friends were not wanting, of course, who had for years foreseen the event. In fact, they failed to understand how he could have endured it so long--he, the man of genius, o...

Her plaid dress of mixed wool was always wrinkled by rain, and despite the let-out tucks was ever too short. Her rainy-day boots went to the cobbler time and again, and between...

He was soon coming, that was certain. But even if the time was short, why spend it over that disgusting sewing? There was a less wearing way of making a living.

"Well, young lady," said Mr. Pieper, the prominent lawyer, "I have been appointed your guardian. I accepted the office because I thought it my duty--the papers in Lemke _vs._ Mi...

Mrs. Asmussen's two daughters had run away from home again. The whole neighbourhood knew it. Lilly had scarcely set foot in the dusky room smelling of dust and leather, where so...

The black slabs of snow at the edge of the pavement had melted into gleaming puddles, and a sparkling shower fell from the icicles clinging to the roofs. Over to the south-west...

It nestled in the dusty corners, it perched on the bookshelves, it span golden cobwebs from beam to beam, it rode on every ray of light reflected from the windows opposite on th...

One grey October morning, which hid the threat of approaching winter behind a mask of moist, warm mist as behind a hypocritical smile, the wonderful happened: Mrs. Asmussen's ru...

It was dusk of a wet November day. The spouts were streaming and an endless chain of grey drops glided down the iron rods of the porch railing and fell precipitously into the po...

No, she did not know him. He was not a frivolous lieutenant, nor yet one of the maturer ones, who played the dignified and watched with an expectant smile for the first shy glan...

"Is this you, Lilly Czepanek, to whom such things happen? Or, is it someone else, with whom you changed places, some character in one of your brown-backed books, who will cease...

The train rumbled on in the night. Showers of sparks flew past the window. When the stoker added coal, a beam of light was projected far into the darkness, and for an instant cr...

The colonel wishing, on account of his mesalliance, to avoid his many military friends, did not stop over at Berlin with Lilly, but went directly on to Dresden, which they reach...

They reached Lischnitz late Saturday night. Since the colonel had prohibited a formal reception, all Lilly could see of the castle and outbuildings were black shadowy masses, wh...

The finches were the maddest of all. The titmice, too, made a racket, and so did the nuthatches, and the blackbirds behaved as if they were lords of the place, while the stay-at...

One red August morning Lilly, sprinkled with dew from head to foot and clasping a bunch of dewy roses in both arms, entered the dining-room, where Anna von Schwertfeger, tall an...

When Lilly awoke the next morning she saw that everything about her, the chandelier, the washstand, and the pretty, sentimental gleaner on the wall, had assumed a new aspect, an...

The threshing machine had been singing its autumn song for many a day. Its monotonous whirr could be heard far beyond the castle court. It carried no message of golden blessings...

Delightful times followed. A game of hide-and-seek with herself, a long-drawn draught from an unfailing fount of expectancy, anticipation, delicious aftertaste and joyous recoll...

First came dread, the same senseless dread that had dominated Lilly's being before her engagement. It stiffened her limbs, bound her arms to her body, crippled her knees, beat a...

Miss von Schwertfeger had said good-night, and _he_ was sitting at Lilly's pillow wet and frozen through. He had been standing in the chilly drizzle a long time before the signa...

From what has happened you can imagine that everything between us must come to an end. Yes, all's over. We shall never see each other except at meal times. If you ask me whether...

In the divorce proceedings there had been no attempt at dissimulation or concealment, and the case moved along rapidly. Lilly alone was found guilty, and, upon the colonel's dep...

One of the best of the "best rooms" in Berlin which are to be found in houses having once known those renowned better days and which are let out to decent young women for thirty...

The street wore its usual appearance. Truck waggons rattled along; women doing their marketing crowded in front of the provision shops; young men, hastening by with portfolios o...

Mr. August Kellermann, though unsuccessful in selling his pictures, enjoyed a fair reputation as a painter. He was a knowing fellow of about thirty-five, seven times washed in t...

When she lay on her bed during the hot summer nights, sleepless from overwork, she would give herself up to wild dreams of what she would do when her art had conquered the world.

The mottled golden tops of the chestnuts grew paler, the gaps ever wider that the autumn ate into the foliage. Where a soothing green had cut off the view, now glittered the bri...

The physician, called in at Mr. Dehnicke's insistence, was one of those extremely busy men who make the rounds of numberless houses a day. First he took a good look at the apart...

Every afternoon Mr. Dehnicke came for his cup of tea, and now he was no longer Mr. Dehnicke; he was Richard, dear, beloved Richard, to whom one waved and nodded cheerily from th...

Richard reluctantly adapted himself to a less showy existence. He still wanted to parade his possession of Lilly; but little Mrs. Jula's homily had sunk deep into his conscience...

Once more the chestnuts put on their yellow cloaks and the peep holes in the foliage widened. From her window Lilly could see the ducks foraging, and the odorous, fruit-laden ba...

During a four weeks' stay in the Riesengebirge, she met a novelist whose name was then on everybody's lips. He was airing his newly acquired fame in the Bohemian resorts and plu...

Early in the autumn of the same year Richard went to Ostend to have a married man's vacation, while Lilly cheaply and innocently passed for a widow of rank in a hall resort on t...

Nobody was so blind as not to detect, on coming closer how worm-eaten was her existence. Least of all he whose fine feelings vibrated under each spiritual touch and awoke an anx...

Each spring in a man's life has its peculiar aspect and its peculiar history. Each spring finds him different, each stirs new depths and opens fresh, hidden wounds. One spring p...

Such an amount of blush brightness was gathered under the three great arches where they led into the open, that as the train glided beneath them you thought you were dipping int...

In the first place Adele proved to be a circumspect ally, thoroughly accustomed to be uncommunicative and passionately devoted to the cause of Lilly's lover. In the second place...

The denizens of the aristocratic west side who remained in town with no employer to drive them dreamed away idle days behind drawn shades, hovering between the couch and the bat...

Lilly was spared the disgrace of being caught like a criminal, and by an act of volition was enabled to prove that she was not unworthy of the great passion that had blessed her...

Mrs. Laue was not a little astonished when one day her former tenant, the _grande dame_, appeared at her door in an ill-fitting alpaca suit and a sailor hat, trimmed with a gree...

She knew Albert, too, the tall, dignified porter, who stood in the doorway, and put his hand to his braided cap. It was he who had acted as the go-between for her and the handso...

What a farce and a lark the dreaded examination had been! What a jumping-jack, what a buffoon he was, that keen, penetrating man of the world, who had probably ground women's de...

The world went its way, calmly, gaily, busily, as if nothing had occurred, as if no lost happiness were tossing about on the sea of life, disappearing farther and farther in the...