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In a wing of the court lived a charwoman with her daughter Magda. Was her name really Magda? I do not know, but I always called her so to myself when as a child I heard the older people tell of her on a winter evening in the twilight; and I pictured to myself a pale, shy little child’s face, flooded about with an abundance of bright hair, and with a very red mouth. She was fifteen and had just been confirmed. Perhaps it was that “being confirmed” which made me represent her to myself as serious and quiet, like the young girls I used to see in church on Sunday, and which caused me to think of her as clad in a long shiny black dress.

In the spring, when the student began to convalesce, the charwoman’s daughter came by his desire to sit at his bedside a while in the afternoon and read aloud.

Mrs. Wetzmann did not approve of this. She was afraid a liking might grow up between them. Her stepson, for all she cared, might fall in love with whomsoever he wished and might betroth himself, too—that did not concern her; but at least it must not be with a charwoman’s daughter! She kept a mistrustful eye on Magda, but had to put up with the arrangement. An invalid should of course be diverted in some way or other; and the doctor had forbidden him to read in bed, because he had weak eyes and was not to overstrain himself.