After she had dawdled, looked over and stretched each of her handsome limbs, she sang, as she washed, a sentimental _Lied_ in fourteen couplets, threw water at Christophe's face--he was outside drumming on the window--and as they left she plucked the last rose in the garden and then they took the steamer. The mist was not yet gone: but the sun shone through it: they floated through a creamy light. Ada sat at the stern with Christophe: she was sleepy and a little sulky: she grumbled about the light in her eyes, and said that she would have a headache all day. And as Christophe did not take her complaints seriously enough she returned into morose silence. Her eyes were hardly opened and in them was the funny gravity of children who have just woke up. But at the next landing-stage an elegant lady came and sat not far from her, and she grew lively at once: she talked eagerly to Christophe about things sentimental and distinguished. She had resumed with him the ceremonious _Sie_. Christophe was thinking about what she could say to her employer by way of excuse for her lateness. She was hardly at all concerned about it. "Bah! It's not the first time." "The first time that ... what?" "That I have been late," she said, put out by the question. He dared not ask her what had caused her lateness. "What will you tell her?" "That my mother is ill, dead ... how do I know?" He was hurt by her talking so lightly. "I don't want you to lie." She took offense: "First of all, I never lie.... And then, I cannot very well tell her...." He asked her half in jest, half in earnest: "Why not?" She laughed, shrugged, and said that he was coarse and ill-bred, and that she had already asked him not to use the _Du_ to her. "Haven't I the right?" "Certainly not." "After what has happened?" "Nothing has happened." She looked at him a little defiantly and laughed: and although she was joking, he felt most strongly that it would not have cost her much to say it seriously and almost to believe it. But some pleasant memory tickled her: for she burst out laughing and looked at Christophe and kissed him loudly without any concern for the people about, who did not seem to be in the least surprised by it. * * * * * Now on all his excursions he was accompanied by shop-girls and clerks: he did not like their vulgarity, and used to try to lose them: but Ada out of contrariness was no longer disposed for wandering in the woods. When it rained or for some other reason they did not leave the town he would take her to the theater, or the museum, or the _Thiergarten_: for she insisted on being seen with him. She even wanted him to go to church with her; but he was so absurdly sincere that he would not set foot inside a church since he had lost his belief--(on some other excuse he had resigned his position as organist)--and at the same time, unknown to himself, remained much too religious not to think Ada's proposal sacrilegious.