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that the currency was being inflated so that German goods might
    sell more easily abroad, but the old lady would not have it.
    “Nonsense. All I know is that once I was comfortably off on the money my dear father
    left me, and now I am growing poorer every day. Now you tell me they are doing this so that the
    foreigner may buy more cheaply. Why does the Government wish to benefit the foreigner at the
    expense of its own people? Nonsense. They ought to be turned out of office.”
    “Perhaps there will soon come a turn for the better,” said Klaus hopefully, but he was
    wrong, for things went from bad to worse. Early in 1922 Fräulein Rademeyer’s income dwindled
    to vanishing point, and she sold the white house in Haspe with most of its contents and moved
    into Dusseldorf to share Klaus’ lodgings. The sale took place during the holidays, so Klaus was
    at Haspe to see it through and to stand by Ludmilla Rademeyer as the auctioneer’s men carried
    the old-fashioned furniture out on the lawn in the cruelly bright sunshine. The old lady sat very
    upright in a chair under the verandah and watched proceedings, although Klaus begged her to
    come away.
    “I wish you wouldn’t stay here,” he said. “Come to the doctor’s house and rest there till it
    is over, it will be too much for you.”
    “I would rather stay, or these people will think I am a coward. Besides, what does it
    matter? It is only old furniture, and the people who loved it are all dead except me.”
    “Who cares what people think?”
    “I do, my dear, one must set a good example.”
    Klaus bit his lip.
    “How curiously shabby the things look, my dear, I had no idea that tapestry was so faded.
    It is time they were turned out.”
    Her voice was perfectly steady and her face calm, but the thin hands in her lap were
    twitching, and Klaus turned away his head so as to avoid seeing them. He caught sight of the old
    doctor making his way round the crowd, excused himself, and went to meet him.
    “How’s she taking it?”
    “Very well. Too well. I’ve been trying to persuade her to come away to your house, but
    she won’t, she only sits there and gets older every moment.”
    “I’d like to put her under chloroform,” grunted the doctor.
    They were fairly comfortable at first in Dusseldorf, though every day saw prices higher
    and food and clothing scarcer, but the real blow fell when Lehmann’s school closed because the
    parents could no longer pay the fees, and Klaus found himself unemployed. This was the time
    when the mark soared to an astronomical figure, and people took attaché cases to collect the
    bulky bundles of worthless notes which constituted their wages. Klaus tramped the streets
    looking for work, occasionally getting a week’s employment sawing timber or loading bricks,
    while Ludmilla, when his back was turned, trotted out and sold her mother’s watch or the gold
    cross and chain she had worn for her first communion. They moved into cheaper rooms, and then
    into cheaper ones again, and Klaus almost reached breaking-point the day he went to look for her
    and found her patiently scrubbing his shirt in the communal wash-house.
    “But, my dear boy, it’s the only place where there is any hot water. One must be clean.”
    “I will not have you there,” he stormed, “among all those rough women. I can wash my
    shirt myself.”
    He said “my shirt,” you notice, not “my shirts.” As for the rough women, he need not
    have worried. Apart from a tendency to call a spade a spade not one of them would ever have
    used a word deliberately to distress or embarrass Ludmilla. Still matters grew worse. There
    followed the communal kitchen, the soup-kitchen, and the bread queues, the gnawing hunger
    and, as the winter came on, the cold, and even Ludmilla’s courage sank.
    “I think I have lived rather too long,” she said.

4
    Fräulein Rademeyer came back one day to the two bleak rooms they tried to call home,
    and Klaus lifted his head in