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Updated: May 19, 2025
Reimers felt rather vexed, and was just turning away when the gunner returned and asked him to come in. He conducted the lieutenant along the corridor. "My mistress is in her boudoir," he said. Reimers was shown into a small room, the only window of which was darkened. Frau von Gropphusen half raised herself from a broad couch.
More than once a sisterly feeling impelled her, not from curiosity, but from genuine sympathy, to put a question to Hannah about her sorrow; but she read in the sombre, hopeless eyes of the sufferer that the burden must be borne alone; so she left Frau von Gropphusen in peace.
The ladies of the regiment pronounced this attire "indecent"; though not one of them would have hesitated to dress similarly, if it had suited her as well as it did Frau von Gropphusen. It was difficult to say wherein the difference consisted, perhaps her skirt was a little longer than the other's, but the whole effect was not so successful.
"You are an extraordinary young idealist," the colonel had said to him not long before; Reimers began to think so too. Concerning a woman whose favours were to be bought, one might think as did Landsberg; but not concerning a lady of social standing. It never occurred to him to think whether Frau von Gropphusen was or was not high-bosomed; he only knew that she was lovely.
A clear voice, which would have sounded merry, but that for the moment it seemed a little breathless, called up to the arbour: "Hurrah! hurrah! And for the third time hurrah! Can one get anything to drink here?" Güntz hurried to the balustrade. "My dear lady!" he exclaimed astonished. "Certainly you can! There's still lots left." He turned round: "Pardon me, sir, but here's Frau von Gropphusen."
His spirit was free from all other prepossession. Enthusiasm for his country, for his calling, had been driven out of him. His whole being was defenceless against the might of this love, and he was carried away by it as on the wings of a tempest. He now only lived in the thought of Hannah Gropphusen. How long was it since he had seen her last?
"Who rides so late through night and wind?" asked Kläre merrily, holding out her hand cordially to the new arrival. Hannah Gropphusen greeted the festive circle with a bright smile, and replied: "Do forgive me, Colonel von Falkenhein. The lights and the festivity in your arbour were too inviting."
Frau von Gropphusen now made quite a business of helping Marie von Falkenhein about her clothes. Hannah's slender hands were quicker and cleverer than those of the deftest maid, and she knew how to transform the young girl's plain boarding-school frocks into something quite pretty and original. She did all this with a soft motherly tenderness, hardly in accordance with her own youthfulness.
Reimers liked to hear her subdued voice extolling the mysteries of the Catholic faith; he was proof against her endeavours, but a beneficent calm emanated from this unworldly woman, and he could feel with her that the spiritual renunciations of Catholicism offered a quiet resting-place to the world-weary. The Gropphusen interested him.
Then a door banged within the house, and light steps approached. The chain was taken down and the key turned in the lock. Hannah Gropphusen stood on the threshold, a weary expression on her pale face; she was clad in a loose flowing gown of thin white silk. Her shoulders scarcely seemed fit to bear the weight of anything heavier than this light airy texture.
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