She was dressed in that way when the men came to sell our house in the Kramgasse at auction.

She must have been one of the women under whose management, as a matter of course, the household is neglected." "How can you talk so about your own mother ?" Wolf interrupted in a somewhat reproachful tone.
"Because we are not here to flatter the dead or to speak falsely to each other, but to understand how matters are between us," she answered gravely.

"How you are constituted is best known to yourself, but it seems to me that while far away you have formed a totally false opinion of me, whom you placed upon the throne of your heart, and I wish to correct it, that you may not plunge into misfortune like a deluded simpleton and drag me with you.

Where, as in my case, so many things are different from what the good and humble would desire them to be, it is not very pleasant to open one's whole heart to another, and there is no one else in the world for whom I would do it.

Perhaps I shall not succeed at all, for often enough I am incomprehensible to myself.