Disorder and Early Sorrow by Thomas Mann — Read

The principal dish at the midday meal had been confined to vegetables; that is, to cabbage fricandeaux; it was followed by a thin, flabby pudding, concocted from one of the pudding-powders, tasting of almonds and soap, which filled the shops. While Xavier, the youthful butler, in a striped coat which he had grown out of, in white cotton gloves and yellow sandals, served this mixture, the Big Ones gently reminded their father that they would have company today.

The Big Ones -- that is to say, Ingrid, who was eighteen years old and had brown eyes and was a very charming girl, and Bert, who was fair-haired and seventeen. Ingrid was about to graduate and was pretty certain of passing, if only for the reason that she was able to twist the teachers and especially the director round her little finger and exact absolute indulgence. She intended, however, to make no use of her degree, but to force her way upon the stage, by virtue of her agreeable smile, her equally engaging voice, and her marked and amusing talent for parody. Bert, for his part, was determined not to finish school at all, but to plunge into the thick of life at once, and become either a dancer, a cabaret reciter, or a waiter; the last, however, only "in Cairo" -- to which end he had once made an attempt to escape the parental home, at five in the morning, an attempt that had barely been frustrated. He revealed a decided resemblance to Xavier, the butler, who was of the same age; not because he was in any way ordinary -- he even bore in feature a close resemblance to his father, Professor Cornelius -- but rather through some approach from another side, or at least through a kind of alternating adjustment of types, in which an extensive compromise in the matter of clothes and in general behaviour played the chief part. Both wore their thick hair very long and carelessly parted in the middle, and in consequence both had acquired the same movement of the head, whenever they tossed back an obtruding lock from their foreheads. Whenever one of them went out through the garden gate, bareheaded no matter what the weather might be, and wearing a linen Norfolk jacket belted out of sheer sportiness with a leather strap, with body bent forward and head inclined slightly upon the shoulder, and rushed off, or mounted his bicycle -- Xavier indiscriminately using the bicycles of the whole family, even the women's, and when he was particularly happy-go-lucky, even the professor's -- then Doctor Cornelius, standing at his bedroom window, was unable, try as he might, to distinguish his son from his servant. He thought that they looked like young muzhiks, one like the other. Both were passionate cigarette-smokers, even though Bert had not the means to buy as many as Xavier, who had established a record of thirty a day, smoking a brand that bore the name of a popular film-star.