Free The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

her head feels suddenly strangely light and the skin of her neck cool and bare. She wants to look in the mirror, but keeping her eyes closed is prolonging the numb dreamy feeling so pleasantly. Meanwhile a second young woman has slipped beside her likea sylph to do her nails while the other is waving her hair. She submits to it all without resistance, almost without surprise, and makes no protest when, after an introductory “ Vous êtes un peu pâle, Mademoiselle, ” the busy salonist, employing all manner of pencils and crayons, reddens her lips, reinforces the arches of her eyebrows, and touches up the color of her cheeks. She’s aware of it all and, in her pleasant detached stupor, unaware of it too: drugged by the humid, fragrance-laden air, she hardly knows if all this is happening to her or to some other, brand-new self. It’s all dreamily disjointed, not quite real, and she’s a little afraid of suddenly falling out of the dream.
    Her aunt finally appears. “Excellent,” she pronounces to the salonist with the air of a connoisseur. Before they leave for their walk she requests that they pack up some additional packets, pencils, and bottles. Christine avoids the mirror as she gets up, only touching the nape of her neck lightly. From time to time as they walk along she looks down surreptitiously at the taut skirt, the brightly patterned stockings, the shiny elegant shoes, and senses that her step is surer. Pressed close to her aunt, she allows everything to announce itself: the landscape with its vivid green and the panoramic sweep of the peaks, the hotels like castles of luxury at challenging vantages high on the slopes, the expensive stores with their provocative, extravagant window displays, furs, jewelry, watches, antiques, all of it strange and foreign next to the vast desolate majesty of the glacier. The horses in their fine harnesses, the dogs, the people are marvelous too, their own clothes as bright as Alpine flowers; the entire atmosphere of sunshiny insouciance, a world without work or poverty whose existence she never dreamed of. Her aunt tells her the names of the mountains, the hotels, points out prominent hotel guests as they pass by; she listens and looks up at them in awe. It seems more and more marvelous that she can be walking here, that it’s permitted, and she feels more and more uncertain that she is the one experiencing this. At last her aunt looks at her watch.“We have to go back. It’s time to get dressed. We only have an hour till dinner. And lateness is the only thing that can make Anthony angry.”
     
    Christine finds her room already tinged by dusk. The early infiltration of dusk is making everything in it seem vague and silent. The sharp oblong of sky behind the open balcony door is still a deep, saturated blue, but the colors inside are beginning to dim at the edges, fading into the velvety shadows. Christine goes out onto the balcony, facing the immense landscape with its swiftly unfurling play of colors. First the clouds lose their radiant white, gradually reddening, subtly at the beginning, then more and more deeply, as if provoked despite themselves by the quickening sunset. Then shadows well up from the mountainsides, shadows that were weak and isolated during the day, lurking behind the trees, but now they’re massing together, becoming dense and bold, as though a black pool from the valley were rushing up to the peaks, and for a moment it seems possible that darkness might inundate the mountaintops too and the whole vast sweep turn suddenly black and void—in fact there’s already a slight breath of frost, an invisible wave of it rising out of the valleys. But now the peaks are glowing in a colder, paler light: the moon has appeared in the blue that’s far from gone. It floats like a streetlight, high and round, over the space between two of the mightiest peaks, and what was just now a real scene with colors and details is becoming a silhouette, a solid black-