“Don’t get angry,” said Frieda, “you must try to understand why we’re upset. I can put it in this way, it’s all owing to Barnabas that we belong to each other now. When I saw you for the first time in the bar—when you came in arm in arm with Olga—well, I knew something about you, but I was quite indifferent to you. I was indifferent not only to you, but to nearly everything, yes, nearly everything. For at that time I was discontented about lots of things, and often annoyed, but it was a queer discontent and a queer annoyance. For instance, if one of the customers in the bar insulted me, and they were always after me—you saw what kind of creatures they were, but there were many worse than that, Klamm’s servants weren’t the worst—well, if one of them insulted me, what did that matter to me? I regarded it as if it had happened years before, or as if it had happened to someone else, or as if I had only heard tell of it, or as if I had already forgotten about it. But I can’t describe it, I can hardly imagine it now, so different has everything become since losing Klamm.”
And Frieda broke off short, letting her head drop sadly, folding her hands on her bosom.
“You see,” cried the landlady, and she spoke not as if in her own person but as if she had merely lent Frieda her voice; she moved nearer too, and sat close beside Frieda, “you see, sir, the results of your actions, and your assistants too, whom I am not allowed to speak to, can profit by looking on at them. You’ve snatched Frieda from the happiest state she had ever known, and you managed to do that largely because in her childish susceptibility she could not bear to see you arm in arm with Olga, and so apparently delivered hand and foot to the Barnabas family. She rescued you from that and sacrificed herself in doing so. And now that it’s done, and Frieda has given up all she had for the pleasure of sitting on your