"It did. And my calling after all being that of peace, and my visit so short, that whatever happened could be endured, I relinquished logic and purchased in its place a woollen scarf. This one. Then I gave myself up unrestrictedly to their air." "And did you like it?" "It made me recollect with pleasure that I was soon going home. In East Prussia there are, on the one hand, drawbacks; but, on the other, are double windows, stoves, and a just proportion of feathers for each man's bed. Till the draughts and blankets of the boarding-house braced me to enduring instead of enjoying I had thought my holiday too short, and when I remembered my life and work at home--my official life and work--it had been appearing to me puny." "Puny?" said Ingeborg, her eyes on his white tie. "Puny. The draughts and blankets of the boarding-house cured me. I am returning gladly. My life there, I say to myself, may be puny but it is warm. So," he added, smiling, "a man learns content." "Taught by draughts and blankets?" "Taught by going away." "Oh?" said Ingeborg. Had Providence then only led her to that poster in order that she should learn content? Were Dent's Tours really run, educationally, by Providence? "But--" she began, and then stopped. "It is necessary to go away in order to come back," said the German gentleman, again with patience. "Yes. Of course. But--" "The chief use of a holiday is to make one hungry to have finished with it." "Oh _no_," she protested, the joy of holiday in her voice. "Ah. You are at the beginning." "The very beginning." "Yet at the end you, too, will return home reconciled." She looked at him and shook her head. "I don't think reconciled is quite the--" She paused, thinking. "To what?" she went on. "To puniness, too?" The two ladies faltered in their conversation, and glanced at Ingeborg, and then at each other. "Perhaps not to puniness. You are not a pastor." There was a distinct holding of the breath of the two ladies. The German gentleman's slow speech fell very clearly on their sudden silence. "No," said Ingeborg. "But what has that--" "I am. And it is a puny life." Ingeborg felt a slight curdling. She thought of her father--also, if you come to that, a pastor. She was sure there was nothing in anything he ever did that would strike him as puny. His life was magnificent and important, filled to bursting point with a splendid usefulness and with a tendency to fill the lives of every one who came within his reach to their several bursting points, too. But he, of course, was a prince of the Church. Still, he had gone through the Church's stages, beginning humbly; yet she doubted whether at any moment of his career he had looked at it and thought it puny. And was it not indeed the highest career of all? However breathless and hurried it made one's female relations in its upper reaches, and drudging in its lower, the very highest? But though she was curdled she was interested.