Page 155 - of-human-bondage-
P. 155

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
   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160