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in the Anlage was violent and crude; and the houses, when
the sun caught them, had a dazzling white which stimu-
lated till it hurt. Sometimes on his way back from Wharton
Philip would sit in the shade on one of the benches in the
Anlage, enjoying the coolness and watching the patterns
of light which the sun, shining through the leaves, made
on the ground. His soul danced with delight as gaily as the
sunbeams. He revelled in those moments of idleness stolen
from his work. Sometimes he sauntered through the streets
of the old town. He looked with awe at the students of the
corps, their cheeks gashed and red, who swaggered about in
their coloured caps. In the afternoons he wandered about
the hills with the girls in the Frau Professor’s house, and
sometimes they went up the river and had tea in a leafy beer-
garden. In the evenings they walked round and round the
Stadtgarten, listening to the band.
Philip soon learned the various interests of the house-
hold. Fraulein Thekla, the professor’s elder daughter, was
engaged to a man in England who had spent twelve months
in the house to learn German, and their marriage was to
take place at the end of the year. But the young man wrote
that his father, an india-rubber merchant who lived in
Slough, did not approve of the union, and Fraulein Thekla
was often in tears. Sometimes she and her mother might be
seen, with stern eyes and determined mouths, looking over
the letters of the reluctant lover. Thekla painted in water co-
lour, and occasionally she and Philip, with another of the
girls to keep them company, would go out and paint little
pictures. The pretty Fraulein Hedwig had amorous trou-
1 Of Human Bondage