That was the first time she noticed it, but the resemblance was unmistakable, was, when you had once seen it, overwhelming. There was no trace, now that she tremblingly examined him, of either Robert or herself; and as for her own family, what had become of all that very real beauty, the beauty of the Bishop, the dazzlingness of Judith, and the sweet regularities of her mother? Robertlet was as much like Frau Dremmel as he might have been if Frau Dremmel had herself produced him in some miraculous manner entirely unassisted. The resemblance was flagrant. It grew with every bottle. He had the same steady eyes. He had the same prolonged silences. His nose was a copy. His head, hairless, was more like Frau Dremmel's, thought Ingeborg, than Frau Dremmel's could ever have possibly been, and if ever his hair grew, she said to herself gazing at him wide-eyed, it would undoubtedly do it from the beginning in a knob. Gradually as the days passed and the likeness appeared more and more she came, when she tubbed him and powdered his many creases, to have a sensation of infinite indiscretion; and she announced to Herr Dremmel, who did not understand, that Robertlet's first word would certainly be _Bratkartoffel_. "Why?" asked Herr Dremmel, from the other side of a wall of thinking. "You'll see if it isn't," nodded Ingeborg, with a perturbed face. But Robertlet's first word, and for a long time his only one, was _Nein_. His next, which did not join it till some months later, was _Adieu_, which is the German for good-bye and which he said whenever anybody arrived. "He isn't very _hospitable_," thought Ingeborg; and remembered with a chill that not once since her marriage had her mother-in-law invited her to her house in Meuk. But she made excuses for him immediately. "Everybody," she said to herself, "feels a little stiff at first."... To this beautiful corner of the lake, for it was very beautiful those delicate autumn afternoons, she went during Robertlet's dinner sleep to do what she called think things out; and she sat on the little shells with her hands round her knees, staring across the quiet water at the line of pale reeds along the other shore, doing it. Presently, however, she perceived that her thinking was more a general discomfort of the mind punctuated irregularly by flashes than anything that could honestly be called clear. Things would not be thought out--at least they would not be thought out by her; and she was feeling sick again; and how, she asked herself, can people who are busy being sick be anything _but_ sick? Besides, things wouldn't bear thinking out. Her eyes grew bright with fear when one of those flashes lit up what was once more ahead of her. It was like a scarlet spear of terror suddenly leaping at her heart....