The girl came back with the key. She looked as though she had a personal prejudice against me. She opened the door just wide enough for a lean person to squeeze through, and bade me, with manifest reluctance, come in. The hall had a brick floor and an umbrella stand. In the umbrella stand stood an umbrella, and as the girl, who walked in front of me, passed it, she snatched out the umbrella and carried it with her, firmly pressed to her bosom. I did not at once grasp the significance of this action. She put me into an icy shut-up room and left me to myself. It was the _gute Stube_--good room--room used only on occasions of frigid splendor. Its floor was shiny with yellow paint, and to meet the difficulty of the paint being spoiled if people walked on it and that other difficulty of a floor being the only place you can walk on, strips of cocoanut matting were laid across it from one important point to another. There was a strip from the door to the window; a strip from the door to another door; a strip from the door to the sofa; and a strip from the sofa on which the caller sits to the chair on which sits the callee. A baby of apparently brand newness was crying in an adjoining room. I waited, listening to it for what seemed an interminable time, not daring to sit down because it is not expected in Germany that you shall sit in any house but your own until specially requested to do so. I stood staring at the puddles my clothes and umbrella were forming on the strip of matting, vainly trying to rub them out with my feet. The wail of the unfortunate in the next room was of an uninterrupted and haunting melancholy. The rain beat on the windows forlornly. As minute after minute passed and no one came I grew very restless. My fingers began to twitch, and my feet to tap. And I was cooling down after my quick walk with a rapidity that meant a cough and a sore throat. There was no bell, or I would have rung it and begged to be allowed to go away. I did turn round to open the door and try to attract the servant's notice and tell her I could wait no longer, but I found to my astonishment that the door was locked. After that the whole of my reflections were resolved into one chaotic Dear me, from which I did not emerge till the parson appeared through the other door, bringing with him a gust of wailing from the unhappy baby within and of the characteristic smell of infant garments drying at a stove.