came to Berlin she called on them and invited them to dinner, when her former celebrated triumphs in cookery were repeated.  If she found out that any wealthy inhabitants of Stettin had been in Berlin without informing her of the fact, she took it so much to heart that she had to go to bed for a week.  A few Stettin families, who in the course of the year emigrated to the capital, constituted her circle of visiting acquaintances, enlarged later by Malvine’s school friends, and introductions at their houses.  The connection with the Ellrichs was through the Stettin circle.  Frau Brohl gave a large soiree twice in the course of the winter, when the invitations they had received were returned.  Since Malvine was grown up there had been dancing, although the small size of the drawing-room, and the displacement of all Frau Brohl’s needlework, set everything in great confusion.

This kind of life and its surroundings naturally could not develop Malvine’s mind and character in any high degree.  She missed any stimulus from her mother or from her grandmother; she only learned to respect rich people, to fathom the mysteries of the kitchen, and to cultivate a taste for peculiar and original fancy work; she was, however, a good-tempered, rather slow-witted girl, of well-balanced mind, without a trace of capriciousness or the nervous temperament so common to city life; within her limited view of things she had a good, honest intelligence, and with her plump figure and her round, rosy face, which bore witness to her grandmother’s kitchen, she was very comely in men’s eyes.

Paul Haber had already become acquainted with the flat in the Lutzowstrasse during the winter before the war, and he liked the quiet he found in the corners of the little rooms, and in the muffled voices of these three women.  The friendship was continued during the war by means of frequent letters, and on his home-coming Paul renewed his visits with pleasure.  By cautious inquiries he had gathered that Malvine had sixty thousand thalers in cash as her dowry, and would inherit double that sum.  Her modest, quiet, amiable disposition made him drift into a strong attachment; her appearance was sufficiently womanly and charming, and her steady, practical views on things, utterly unromantic an unenthusiastic, harmonized entirely with his own.  It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated talk of original, poetically minded young ladies had repelled and bored him.  At his first meeting with Malvine Marker he had thought that she was the wife for him, and since he had become friendly with her and her circle, he said to himself, “This one and no other.”