Before he had time to answer his sister’s questions, her husband, Joseph Nuessler, came in, and going up to Hawermann shook hands with him, and said, taking as long to get out his words as dry weather does to come:  “Good day, brother-in-law; won’t you sit down?” “Let him tell us what’s wrong,” interrupted his wife impatiently.  “Yes,” said Joseph, “sit down and tell us what has happened.  Good-day, Braesig; be seated, Braesig.”  Then Joseph Nuessler, or as he was generally called, young Joseph, sat down in his own peculiar corner beside the stove.  He was a tall, thin man, who never could hold himself erect, and whose limbs bent in all sorts of odd places whenever he wanted to use them in the ordinary manner.  He was nearly forty years old, his face was pale, and almost as long as his way of drawling out his words, his soft blond hair, which had no brightness about it, hung down equally long over his forehead and his coat collar.  He had never attempted to divide or curl it.  When he was a child his mother had combed it straight down over his brow, and so he had continued to do it, and whenever it had looked a little rough and unkempt, his mother used to say:  “Never mind, Josy, the roughest colt often makes the finest horse.”  Whether it was that his eyes had always been accustomed to peer through the long hair that overhung them, or whether it was merely his nature cannot be known with any certainty, but there was something shy in his expression, as if he never could look anything full in the face, or come to a decision on any subject, and even when his hand went out to the right, his mouth turned to the left.  That, however, came from smoking, which was the only occupation he carried out with the slightest perseverance, and as he always kept his pipe in the left corner of his mouth, he, in course of time, had pressed it out a little, and had drawn it down to the left, so that the right side of his mouth looked as if he were continually saying “prunes and prism,” while the left side looked as if he were in the habit of devouring children.

There he was now seated in his own particular corner by the stove, and smoking out of his own particular corner of his mouth, and while his lively wife wept in sympathy with her brother’s sorrow, and kissed and fondled him and his little daughter alternately, he kept quite still, glancing every now and then from his wife and Hawermann at Braesig, and muttering through a cloud of tobacco smoke:  “It all depends upon what it is.  It all depends upon circumstances.  What’s to be done now in a case like this?”

Braesig had quite a different disposition from young Joseph, for instead of sitting still like him, he walked rapidly up and down the room, then seated himself upon the table, and in his excitement and restlessness swung his short legs about like weaver’s shuttles.  When Mrs. Nuessler kissed and stroked her brother, he did the same; and when Mrs. Nuessler took the little child and rocked it in her arms, he took it from her and walked two or three times up and down the room with it, and then placed it on the chair again, and always right on the top of the grandmother’s best cap.