"But then you wouldn't have been lonely," said Ingeborg.

"But then, Frau Pastor, they would not have been married."

"No. And then," said Ingeborg, interested, "you wouldn't have been able to _feel_ lonely."

The Baroness gazed at her.

"These things are _nice_, you know," said Ingeborg, leaning forward again in her interest. "One does _like_ it somehow--being sad, you know, and thinking how lonely one is. Of course it's much more delicious to be happy, but not being happy has its jollinesses. There's a perfume...."

She sought about in her mind--"It's like a wet day. It looks gloomy and miserable compared to what yesterday was like, but there _is_ an enjoyment. And things"--she hesitated, groping--"things seem to grow.

Different ones. Yet they're beautiful, too."

But the Baroness, who did not follow and did not want to, for it was not her business to listen to her pastor's wife, drooped an inquiring eye again over Ingeborg's body and cut her tendency to talk more than was becoming in her position short by remarking that she was still very thin.

When they had sat there till the coffee was cold Ingeborg, in a pause of the talk, got up to go.

The three others stared at her without moving. Even her own Robert stared uncomprehending. It seemed a lame thing to have to explain that she was now going home, but that was what she did at last murmur down to the motionless and surprised Baroness.

"Are you not feeling well?" inquired the Baroness.

"What is it, Ingeborg?" asked Herr Dremmel.

The Baron went over to a window and opened it. "A little faint, no doubt," he said, adding something about young wives.

The Baroness asked her if she would like to lie down.

Herr Dremmel became alert and interested. "What is it, Little One?" he asked again, getting up.

"I think it would be good if the Frau Pastor rested a little before supper," said the Baroness, getting up, too.

"Certainly," said Herr Dremmel, quite eagerly, and with a funny expression on his face.

Ingeborg gazed from one to the other.

"But, Robert," she said, wondering why he looked like that, "oughtn't we to go home?"

"Dear Frau Pastor," said the Baroness quite warmly, "you will feel better presently. Believe me. There is an hour still before supper. Come with me, and you shall lie down and rest."

"But Robert--" said Ingeborg, astonished.

She was, however, taken away--it seemed a sort of sweeping of her away--through gla.s.s doors, down a carpetless varnished pa.s.sage into a spare bedroom, and commanded to put herself on the high white bed with her head a little lower than her feet.

"But," she said, "why?"

"You will be better by supper-time. Oh, I know all these things," said the Baroness, who was opening windows and had grown suddenly friendly.

"Do you feel sick?"

"Sick?"

She wondered whether the amount of cake she had eaten had appeared excessive. She had had two pieces. Perhaps there was a rigid local custom prescribing only one. She felt again that she was in a net of customs, with n.o.body to explain. The Baroness seemed quite disappointed when she a.s.sured her she did not feel sick at all. Ought guests to feel sick? Was it a subtle way of drawing attention to the irresistibleness of the host's food? It then occurred to her that it might very possibly be the custom in these country places to put callers to bed for an hour in the middle of their call, and that her omission to put her mother-in-law there was one of the causes of her tears. Next to going home as quickly as one did in England she felt going to bed was altogether the best thing.

This thought, that it must be the custom, made her instantly pliable.

With every gesture of politeness she hastened to clamber up on to the billows of feathers and white quilt. There was a smell of naphthalin as she sank downwards, a smell of careful warfare carried on incessantly with moth.

The Baroness came away from letting in floods of air, and looked at her.

"I am sure," she said, "you do feel sick."

"I think I do--a little," said Ingeborg, anxious to give every satisfaction.

It was evidently the right thing to say, for her hostess's face lit up.

She went out of the room quickly and came back with some Eau de Cologne and a fan.

Ingeborg watched her with bright alert eyes over the edge of a billow of feathers while she fetched a little table and brought it to the bed and arranged these things on it.

How odd it was, she thought, greatly interested. Was the Baron simultaneously putting Robert to bed in some other room? She felt she had grown suddenly popular, that she was doing all the right things at last. Contrasted with its loftiness during the first part of the call the Baroness's manner was quite human and warm. She put the table close to her side, and told her the best thing she could do, quite the best thing, would be to try and sleep a little; if she wanted anything she was to ring, and the maid Tina would appear.

"Ah, yes," she said in conclusion, standing for a moment looking down at her and heaving a great sigh that seemed to Ingeborg somehow to be pleasurable, "ah, yes. When one has said A, dear Frau Pastor, one must say B. Ah, yes."

And she went out again on tip-toe, softly closing the door and leaving Ingeborg in a state of extreme and active interest and interrogation.

"When one has said A one must say B...." Why must one? And what was B?

What, indeed, if you came to that, was A?

She listened a moment, raised on her elbow, her bright head more ruffled than ever after its descent into the billows, then she slid down on to the slippery floor and ran across in her stockings to one of the big open windows.

It looked on to a tangle of garden, a sort of wilderness of lilac bushes and syringa and neglected roses and rough gra.s.s and hemlock at the back of the house. There was n.o.body anywhere to be seen, and she got up on to the sill and sat there in great enjoyment, swinging her feet, for it all smelt very sweet at the end of the long hot day, till she thought the hour, the blessed hour, must be nearly over. Then she stole back and rearranged herself carefully on the bed.

"But this is _the_ way of paying calls," she thought, pulling the quilt up tidily under her chin and waiting for what would be done to her next.

CHAPTER XVI

They did not get away till nine o'clock.

There was supper at seven, an elaborate meal, and they sat over it an hour and a half. Then came more coffee, served on the terrace by servants in white cotton gloves, and half an hour later, just before they left, tea and sandwiches and cakes and fruit and beer.

Ingeborg was now quite clear about the reason for her mother-in-law's tears. She saw very vividly how dreadful her behaviour must have seemed.

That groaning supper-table, that piling up as the end of the visit drew near of more food and more and more, and the refreshment of bed in the middle....

"I shall invite her all over again," she said suddenly, determined to make amends.

When she said this the carriage had finally detached them from sight and sound of the now quite cordial Glambecks, and was heaving through the sand of the dark wooded road beyond their gate.

"Whom will the Little One invite?" asked Herr Dremmel, bending down. He had got his arm round her, and at the bigger joltings tightened his hold and lifted her a little. His voice was tender, and when he bent down there was an enveloping smell of cigars and wine, mixed with the india-rubber of his mackintosh.

Ingeborg knew that for some reason she could not discover she had made herself popular. There was the distinct consciousness of having suddenly, half way through the visit, become a success. And she was still going on being a success, she felt. But why? Robert was extraordinarily attentive. Too attentive, really, for oh, what a wonderful night of stars and warm scents it was, once they were in the open--what a night, what a marvel of a night! And when he bent over her it was blotted out. Dear Robert. She did love him. But away there on that low meadow, far away over there where a white mist lay on the swampy places and the leaves of the flags that grew along the ditch stood up like silver spears in the moonlight, one could imagine the damp cool fragrance rising up as one's feet stirred the gra.s.s, the perfect solitariness and the perfect silence. Except for the bittern. There was a bittern, she had discovered, in those swamps. If she were over there now, lying quite quiet on the higher ground by the ditch, quite quiet and alone, she would hear him presently, solemnly booming.