Little Louise by Thomas Mann — Read

There are marriages the origin of which not even the most practised literary imagination could possibly conceive. One must accept them as one accepts adventurous combinations of contrary qualities in the theatre -- such as old and stupid with beautiful and vivacious -- which are given as assumptions and serve as the basis for the mathematical composition of a farce.

As to the wife of Herr Jacoby, counsellor-at-law, she was young and beautiful, a woman of unusual charms. Some, let us say, thirty years ago she had been christened with the names Anna, Marguerite, Rose, Amalie, but she had always been called Amra, a name composed of the initial letters of all these names, a name which with its exotic ring fitted her personality like no other. For though the darkness of her thick, soft hair, which was parted on the side and drawn back along both sides of her narrow forehead, was only the darkness of the chestnut kernel, her skin revealed a perfect southern smooth and shadowy olive, and this skin covered contours which also seemed to have ripened in a southern sun, and which reminded one of the vegetative and lazy voluptuousness of a sultana. This impression, which was provoked by all of her indolent, sensual movements, also coincided with the likelihood that her reason was subordinated to her heart. One look from her ingenuous, brown eyes, as she drew up her pretty eyebrows towards her almost pathetically low forehead in her original way, was enough to convince one of that. But she, too, knew this -- she was not too simple for that -- she simply avoided exposing herself, by speaking little and seldom; and there is nothing to be said against a woman who is pretty and silent. Oh, that word "simple" was surely least expressive of her. Her look was not only foolish, but also of a certain avid slyness, and one could see plainly that this woman was not too limited in intellect to be inclined to make trouble.