“I don’t propose to ask Frau Weidemann’s pardon anyhow, that’s flat. When I am in a rage, I remain in a rage one week, two months, a whole year!” declared Hermann, doggedly, and remained sternly unapproachable. When I came down to dinner that day I saw poor Danys, her eyes all swollen, her nose red, huddled up in a chair—a picture of misery. “We don’t go for our walk to-morrow!” she said sobbing loudly. The next day I was writing in my room upstairs, with the windows wide open, when suddenly I heard in the garden below my name called in a ringing voice, “Hullo! Madame Vava, look out of the window.” It was Hermann, success written in his sunny little countenance, accompanied by Danys and Frau Weidemann, who having fallen into a melting mood, was taking out the children for their usual walk, and Hermann, radiant with triumph, wanted to prove to me that he had it all his own way. It was Hermann who had forced Danys to ask his forgiveness, and she had coaxed Frau Weidemann, with kisses and pleading words, to go out for a walk with them. She is a weak person, Frau Weidemann; I should have kept my word in her place. Danys also was not quite easy to manage, and was liable sometimes to storms of temper. One afternoon all the company, except myself, went out for a sail on the lake. Frau Weidemann, who had forgotten to prepare a sauce for the trout we were to have at dinner, returned home before the others with Danys, in a small row-boat. Danys was in a fury to come back so early, and made an awful scene with Frau Weidemann, rocking herself to and fro in a paroxysm of grief; she fretted, foamed and turned nasty, shouting out all her bad words, for when she loses her temper she does not measure her language. She called down curses on Frau Weidemann and sent her to Mephistopheles, and wished her at the bottom of the lake, and eaten up by the mermaids. As soon as they reached home the door of my room was dashed open and Danys flew in looking like a fury. “That’s Frau Weidemann who insisted on coming back so early for that horrid old sauce. I hate it and shall never eat it as long as I live! I wish there were no sauces at all in the world, that I do!” cried out Danys. That same day at dinner Danys was tiresome with awkward questions: “why this,” and “why that,” and Frau Weidemann found it necessary to stop her. “Eat your soup,” she said, “and remember that polite little girls never interrupt people’s speeches.” “But I say,” exclaimed Danys, turning to her with blazing eyes and face aflame, “polite little girls can want to know what they do not know, can’t they?” At which her mother administered a good scolding to her and told her that if she said one word more, she would give her a damned slap. “It isn’t me that mamma curses, it is the slap!” said the bold little girl unabashed.