"Why, about your not explaining things to me in time." "What things?" "About your mother having to go to bed." "Why should my mother have to go to bed?" "Oh, Robert--because it's the custom." "It is not. Why do you suppose it is the custom?" "What? When I've just been put there? And you saw me go?" "Ingeborg--" "Oh, don't call me Ingeborg--" "Ingeborg, this is levity. I am prepared for much accommodating of myself to whims in regard to food and kindred matters, but am I to endure levity for nine months?" She stared at him. "You went to bed because you were ill," he said. "I wasn't," she said indignantly. Did he, too, think she did not know how to control herself in the presence of cake? "What? You were not?" There was a note of such sharp disappointment in his voice that in her turn she peered at his face. "Now kindly tell me, Robert," she said, giving his sleeve a slight pull, "what it is you are _really_ talking about." "You did not feel faint? You feel quite well? You do not feel ill after all?" Again the note of astonished disappointment. "But why should I feel ill?" "Then why did you ask to be taken home almost before we had arrived?" For the first time she heard anger in his voice, anger and a great aggrievedness. "Almost before we'd arrived? We'd been there hours. You hadn't _told_ me a call meant supper." "Almighty Heaven," he cried, "am I to dwell on every detail of life? Am I personally to conduct you over each of the inches of your steps? Do you regard me as an elementary school? Can you not imagine? Can you not calculate probabilities? Can you not construct some searchlight of inference of your own, and illuminate with it the outline of at least the next few hours?" She gazed at him a moment in astonishment. "_Well_," she said. If her father had asked her only one of these questions in that sort of voice she would have been without an answer, beaten down and crushed. But Robert had not had the steady continuous frightening of her from babyhood. He could not hold over her, like an awful rod, that she owed her very existence to him. He could not claim perpetual gratitude for this remote tremendous gift, bestowed on her in the days of her unconsciousness. He was a kindly stranger appointed by the Church to walk hand in hand with her along the path of grown-up life. He had admired her, and kissed her, and quite often during their engagement had abased himself at her feet. Also she had seen him at moments such as shaving. "I believe," she said after another astonished pause, "that you're scolding me. And you're scolding me because you're angry with me, and you're angry with me--Robert, is it possible you're angry with me because I'm _not_ ill?" He threw away his cigar and seized her in his arms and began to whisper voluminously into her ear. "What?" she kept on saying. "What? You're tickling me--what? I can't hear--"