B00K 0NE: YESTERD.\Y I13 must apologize. Do it while you are still on your holidays, in a letter. Write to Rector Francois," 20 Sybil had given her maid the evening off. She and Gustav got their cold supper ready together. Busily, charmingly, Sybil bustled to and fro in her pretty two-roomed Bat. It al- ways pleased hirn anew to see her taking his little likes and dislikes into consideration. She had a remarkable understand- ing of the superficial things that make life pleasant. Slim, childlike, clever, charming, she fussed about hirn. She chattered precociously. Everything about her person and her quarters was such that, should necessity arise, one could do without, But if Gustav had to do without her, would life be worth living? Gustav was beaming cheerfully. He very much enjoyed this period between Christmas and the New Year. He sat eating, drinking, chatting. The contract for the biography of Lessing had arrived. The payment was not on a sumptuous scale. He was to receive it in instalments of two hundred marks each for aperiod of eighteen months. Rather a scanty wage for about four thou- sand hours' work. But he had already finished most of the work and now, he remarked jestingly, he had an assured in- corne for one and a half years. Sybil listened attentively, without smiling. She earned on an average from three to four hundred marks a month from her neat, often cruel, little sketches. No one knew how much trouble these sketches cost her, how diligently she polished

114 THE 0PPERMANNS them, and how badly she was paid in the end. Gustav had an easy time of it. For hirn those two hundred marks were a tiny, negligible addition to his incorne. Men gave Bowers, choco- lates, and perfume. They often paid sixty or seventy marks for a dinner in an expensive restaurant. They did not know how much happier you would be if they paid twenty marks for the dinner and paid you the forty marks in cash. Gustav was any- thing but stingy. He regularly deposited a generous amount to her monthly checking account. But to dress weIl cost money, payments for work came in slowly, one was often in a fix. To go to a sensitive man like Gustav for money was quite im- possible. Two hundred marks, The Bat cost money, there was the car, her silk slips. Stockings were cheap. A Russian had just written a good novel about three pairs of silk stockings. She, Sybil, had planned a story about a woman who was a good sociol- ogist, level-headed and reasonable, but forced to earn her living by writing fashion-articles. The working-out of the plot was weak, but now she had got on the track of an idea. The two hundred marks would he a good theme for a seeondary plot. She must really talk to Gustav about it. It was in matters per- taining to "plot" that he was able to give good tips, But he was not in the mood today. She, however, was in the mood. Her brain was husy, she would have liked to jot down the plot of the story. Gustav, meanwhile, was talking about his Lessing. Klaus Frisehlin was turning out to be very useful. The question was, should he employ hirn steadily on this. In that case, Frischlin would have to give up his aetivities as director of the art de- partment at Oppermann's. He would be able to finish the Lessing work in eighteen months at most, Was it worth while, for that purpose, to take Frisehlin out of a not altogether satis- factory but seeure settled position? Sybillistened absently. She was thinking of her story. Gustav