Nothing seemed more characteristic to me than the contrast between my landladies in Vienna and in Berlin. The Viennese was a cheerful, chatty woman who did not keep things too clean, and easily forgot this or that, but was enthusiastically eager to be of service. The one in Berlin was correct and kept everything in perfect order; but in my first monthly account I found every service that she had given me down in neat, vertical writing: three pfennigs for sewing on a trouser button, twenty for removing an ink-spot from the tabletop, until at the end, under a broad stroke of the pen, all of her
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