Free Five Women by Robert Musil

and worn by illness, looking commonplace enough beside the other's youth and courtly grace. She did not give it much thought, but she was a little weary of this country that had promised things beyond the power of words to tell, and she could not bring herself, just because of a cross face, to send away her childhood friend, who had brought back to her the very fragrance of her homeland and thoughts that one could think with laughter. She had nothing to reproach herself with. She had been a shade more superficial during these last weeks, but that was pleasant, and she could now sometimes feel her face lighting up as it had done years before.
    A soothsaying woman, whom he consulted, prophesied to Herr von Ketten : "You will be cured only when you accomplish a task." But when he pressed her to tell him what task, she fell silent, tried to slip away, and finally declared that that was hidden from her.
    He could easily have put a quick, painless end to this visit, for the sanctity of life and the sacred laws of hospitality are of little account to one who has spent years as an unbidden guest among his enemies. But in his enfeebled convalescent state he was almost proud of being clumsy, and any cunning solution seemed to him as unworthy as the young man's frivolous readiness of tongue. Strange things happened to him. Through the mists of weakness that enveloped him his wife's ways seemed to him tenderer than they need be; it reminded him of earlier days, when sometimes, returning home to her love, he had wondered at finding it more intense than at other times. For his absence alone could not, he thought, be the cause. He could not even have said whether he was glad or sorry. It was just as in the days when he had lain so close to death. He could not make any move. When he gazed into his wife's eyes, they were like new-cut glass, and although what the surface showed him was his own reflection, he could not penetrate further. It seemed to him that only a miracle could change this situation. And one cannot make destiny speak when it chooses to be silent. One must simply harken for whatever is on its way.
    One day when a company of them came up the mountainside together, they found the little cat at the gate. It was standing outside the gate as though it did not want to jump, cat-fashion, over the wall, but to enter as human beings did. It arched its back in welcome and rubbed itself against the skirts and boots of the towering beings who were strangely surprised by its presence. They let it in, and it was like receiving a guest. The very next day it was apparent that what they had opened the gate to was no mere kitten that had come to stay; it was almost as though they had adopted a small child. The dainty little creature's tastes were not for the delights of cellar and attic. It would not leave the human beings' company for a single moment. And it had a way of making them give up their time to it, which was all the less comprehensible in that there were so many other and grander animals at the castle, and the human beings also had their own affairs to occupy them. The fascination seemed positively to originate in their having to keep their eyes lowered, watching the little creature, for it was very unobtrusive in its ways and just a shade quieter, one might almost have said sadder and more meditative, than seemed appropriate to a kitten. It romped in the way it knew human beings expect a kitten to romp; it climbed on to their laps and was, it seemed, studiously charming to them, and yet one could feel that it was also somehow absent. And precisely this—this absence of whatever would have made it into an ordinary kitten—was like a second presence, a hovering double, perhaps, or a faint halo surrounding it. Not that any of them had the hardihood to put this into words. The lady from Portugal bent tenderly over the little creature lying on its back in her lap, in its childlike way beating its tiny paws at her playful fingers. Her