“Ecoutez—listen,” she began, leaning towards the greater number of them, seeming to say, “It’s really simple enough, as simple as it is disagreeable: I am going to settle the question for you. Let us then discuss it no more.” It would seem a great effort to do this, too, her lips a little white with fatigue, her eyes heavy with disgust at it all: fighting these things, she was coming to their assistance. “Listen: we none of us know anything about that man”; this was an unfortunate beginning for Bertha, as thoughts, if not eyes, would spring in her direction no doubt, and Fräulein Lipmann even paused as though about to qualify this: “we none of us, I think, want to know anything about him. Therefore why this idiot—the last sort of beer-drinking brute—treated us to his bestial and—and—wretched foolery⸺” Fräulein Lipmann shrugged her shoulders with blank, contemptuous indifference. “I assure you it doesn’t interest me the least little bit in the world to know _why_ such brutes behave like that at certain times. I don’t see any mystery. It seems odd to you that HERR KREISLER should be an offensive brute?” She eyed them a moment. “To me NOT!” “We do him too much honour by discussing him, that’s certain,” said one of them. This was in the spirit of Fräulein Lipmann’s words, but was not accepted by her just then as she had something further to say. “When one is attacked, one does not spend one’s time in considering _why_ one is attacked, but in defending oneself. I am just fresh from the _souillures de ce brute_. If you knew the words he had addressed to me.” Ekhart was getting very red, his eyes were shining, and he was moving rhythmically in his chair something like a steadily rising sea. “Where does he live, Fräulein Lipmann?” he asked. “Nein, Ekhart. One could not allow anybody to embroil themselves with that useless brute.” The “Nein, Ekhart” had been drawled fondly at once, as though that contingency had been weighed, and could be brushed aside lightly in advance. It implied as well an “of course” for his red and dutiful face. “I myself, if I meet him anywhere, shall deal with him better than you could. This is one of the occasions for a woman⸺”