"It's a kindly trick Time plays on us. Are you a real pastor's wife who goes about her parish being an example?"

"I haven't yet. But I'm going to."

"What--not begun in eighteen months? But what do you do then all day long?"

"First I cook, and then I--don't cook."

They were out in the open, on the bit of road that pa.s.sed between meadows. Ingram stopped and looked at something over to the left with sudden absorbed attention. She followed his eyes, but did not see much--a wisp of mist along the gra.s.s, the top twigs of a willow emerging from it, and above it the faint sky. He said nothing, and presently went on walking faster than ever.

"_Please_ go a little slower," begged Ingeborg, her heart thumping with effort.

"I think you know," said Ingram, suiting himself to her, "you should be able to walk better than that."

"Yes," said Ingeborg.

"I suppose that's the danger of places like Kokensee--one lets oneself get slack."

"Yes," said Ingeborg.

"You mustn't, you know. Imagine losing one's lines. Just think of the horrible indefinite lines of a fat woman."

"Yes," said Ingeborg. "Do you paint much?" she asked, unable to endure this turn of the conversation.

He looked at her and laughed. "A good deal," he said. Then he added, "I'm Ingram."

"Is that your name? Mine's Dremmel."

"_Edward_ Ingram," he said, looking at her. It was inconceivable she should not know.

"_Ingeborg_ Dremmel," she said, as though it were a game.

He was silent a moment. Then he stopped with a jerk. "I don't think I'll come any farther," he said. "The Glambecks will be wondering what has become of me. Glambeck brought me down for a couple of nights, and I can't be not there all the time."

"But you wanted to see Kokensee--"

"Doesn't anybody ever read in Kokensee?"

"Read?"

"Papers? Books? Reviews? Criticisms? What the world's doing in all the million places that aren't Kokensee? Who everybody is? What's being thought and created?"

He had an oddly nettled look.

"Robert takes in the Norddeutscheallgemeinezeitung, and I've been reading Kipling--"

"Kipling! Well, good-bye."

"But isn't Kipling--why, till I married I had only the Litany."

"What on earth for?"

"That and Psalms and things. I felt very _empty_ on the Litany."

"I can imagine it. I'd lose no more time then in furnishing my emptiness. Good-bye."

"Oh, don't go--wait a moment. It's such ages since I've--Furnishing it how? What ought I--?"

"Read, read, read--everything you can lay your hands on."

"But there _isn't_ anything to lay hands on."

"My dear lady, haven't you postcards? Write to London and order the reviews to be sent out to you. Get some notion of people and ideas.

Good-bye."

"Oh--but won't you really come and look at Kokensee?"

"It's a dark place. I'm afraid what I'd see there would be nothing."

"There'll be more light to-morrow--"

"I'm going south again to-morrow with Glambeck. I only came for a day. I was curious about provincial German interiors. Good-bye."

"Oh, but do--"

"My advice is very sound, you know. One can't shut one's eyes and just sleep while the procession of men and women who are making the world goes past one, unless"--his eyes glanced over the want of trimness of her figure, the untidy way her loose coat was fastened--"unless one doesn't mind running to seed."

"But I _do_ mind," cried Ingeborg. "It's the last thing I want to run to--"

"Then don't. Good-bye."

He took off his hat and was already several steps away from her by the time it was on his head again. Then he turned round and called out to the dejected little figure standing where he had left it in the sandy road with the grey curtain of mist blurring it: "It really is _everybody's_ duty to know at least something of what's being done in the world."

And he jerked away into the dusk towards Glambeck.

She stood a long while looking at the place where the gloom had blotted him out. Wonderful to have met somebody who really talked to one, who actually told one what to do. She went home making impulsive resolutions, suddenly brave again, her chin in the air. Ill or not ill she was not going to be beaten, she was not going to wait another day before beginning to fill her stupid mind. It was monstrous she should be so ignorant, so uneducated. What was she made of, then, what poor cheap stuff, that she could think of nothing better than to cry because she did not feel as well as she used to? Weren't there heaps of things to do even when one was ill? Had she not herself heard of sick people whose minds triumphed so entirely over their prostrate flesh that from really quite perpetual beds they shed brightness on whole parishes?

She wrote that night to Mudie demanding catalogues of him almost with fierceness, and ordered as a beginning the _Spectator_ and _Hibbert Journal_, both of which at Redchester had been mentioned in her presence by prebendaries. When they arrived she read them laboriously from cover to cover, and then ordered all the monthly reviews they advertised. She subscribed at once to the _Times_ and to a weekly paper called the _Clarion_ because it was alluded to in one of the reviews; she showered postcards on Mudie, for whatever books she read about she immediately bought, deciding that that was as good a way of starting as any other; and she had not been reading papers a week before she came across Edward Ingram's name.

A great light dawned on her. "_Oh_--" she said with a little catch of the breath, turning hot; and became aware that she had just been having the most recognisably interesting encounter of her life.

CHAPTER XXII

In seven years Ingeborg had six children. She completely realised during that period the Psalmist's ideal of a reward for a good man and was altogether the fruitful vine about the walls of his house. She was uninterruptedly fruitful. She rambled richly. She saw herself, at first with an astonished chagrin and afterwards with resignation, swarming up to the eaves of her little home, pauseless, gapless, luxuriantly threatening choke the very chimneys. At the beginning she deplored this uninterrupted abundance, for she could not but see that beneath it the family roof grew a little rotten and sometimes, though she made feeble efforts to keep it out, a rather dismal rain of discomfort soaked in and dimmed the brightness of things. Good servants would not come to such a teeming household. The children that were there suffered because of the children that were soon going to be there. It was a pity, she thought, that when one produced a new child one could not simultaneously produce a new mother for it, so that it should be as well looked after as one's first child had been. She could mend their stockings, because that could be done lying on a sofa, but she was never sure about anything else that concerned them. And there were so many things, such endless vital things to be seen to if babies were to flourish. And when the first ones grew bigger and she might have begun those intimate expeditions and communions with them she used to plan, she found that, too, was impossible, for she was so deeply engaged in providing them with more brothers and sisters that she was unable to move.