She purchased a pair,
wasted no breath calling me, and would come up silently,
as I stood lapped in a false security lost in the contemplation
of a squirrel or a robin, and seize me by the shoulders
from behind, to the grievous unhinging of my nerves.
Stealing along in the fog, I looked back uneasily once
or twice, so vivid was this disquieting memory, and could
hardly be reassured by putting up my hand to the elaborate
twists and curls that compose what my maid calls my Frisur,
and that mark the gulf lying between the present and the past;
for it had happened once or twice, awful to relate and to remember,
that Fraulein Wundermacher, sooner than let me slip through
her fingers, had actually caught me by the long plait of hair
to whose other end I was attached and whose English name
I had been told was pigtail, just at the instant when I
was springing away from her into the bushes; and so had led
me home triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair,
and muttering with a broad smile of special satisfaction,
"Diesmal wirst du mir aber nicht entschlupfen!"
Fraulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must have been
a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman.
But I wished at that moment that she would not haunt me
so persistently, and that I could get rid of the feeling that
she was just behind in her galoshes, with her hand stretched
out to seize me.
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