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228 clothes." And when Guste turned up her nose: "It's too good for working-class brats."

With the tips of her glove Guste lifted one of the pieces from the floor. Immediately Diederich seized her wrist and kissed her hand greedily at the opening in her glove. She gave a frightened look round. "Oh, I see, they are all gone." She laughed confidently. "I guessed what you had still to do in the factory." Diederich looked at her defiantly. "Well, and what about yourself? Why did you come here at all to day? You must have come to the conclusion that I was not after all, such an impossible person. Of course, your Wolfgang—it is not everybody who can make such an ass of him self as he did in court the other day." To which Guste retorted indignantly: "Just you keep your mouth shut. You will never be half the man he is." But her eyes spoke differently, as Diederich noticed. He laughed excitedly. "How anxious he is to have you! Do you know how he regards you? As the pot in which his meal is cooking and which I am to keep stirred for him!" Guste could have annihilated him. "You're a liar!" she said. But Diederich felt in good form. "All that worries him is that there is not enough in the pot. At first, of course, he also believed you had come into a million. But you can't get a man of that type for fifty thousand marks." Then Guste's rage boiled over. She looked so dangerous that Diederich shrank back. "Fifty thousand! Are you crazy? Why must I listen to such talk? I, who have three hundred and fifty thousand in the bank in gilt edged securities. Fifty thousand! Whoever insults me by telling such stories around is open to an action for libel!" She had tears in her eyes, and Diederich stammered apologetically: "Don't mind such things," and Guste used her handkerchief. "Wolfgang knows exactly how I am situated. But you believed the lie yourself. You had the impertinence to believe it," she cried. Her rosy cushions of fat quivered with rage,