She looked at him and pressed her hands together. Vivid recollections lit her eyes. "But I'd give up these splendid contrasts very _willingly_," she whispered, her face gone suddenly terror-stricken. Herr Dremmel said that family life had always been praised not only for its beauty but for its necessity as the foundation of the State. "You told me," said Ingeborg, who had a trick which good men sometimes found irritating of remembering everything they had ever said, "the foundation of the State was manure." Herr Dremmel said so it was. And so was family life. He would not, he informed her, quibble over terms. What he wished to make clear was that there could not be family life without a family to have it in. "And don't you call you and me and Robertlet a family?" she asked. "One child?" said Herr Dremmel. "You would limit the family to one child? That is a highly unchristian line of conduct." "But the Christian lines of conduct seem to _hurt_ so," murmured Ingeborg. "Oh, I know there have to be brothers and sisters," she added quickly before he could speak, "and it _is_ best to get it over and have done with it. It's only when I'm--it's only sometimes that I think Robertlet would have been enough family till--till I'd had time to forget--" Again the light of terror came into her eyes. She knew it was there. She looked down at her plate to hide it. Twice after that she came back from her thinking down by the lake and attempted to talk to him about questions of life and death. Herr Dremmel was bored by questions of life and death unless they were his own ones. He met them, however, patiently. She arrived panting, for it was uphill back to the house, desperately needing her vision rubbed a little clearer against his so that she might reach out to reassurance and courage, and he took on an air of patience almost before she had begun. In the presence of that premature resignation she faltered off into silence. Also what she had wanted to say got tangled into the silliest sentences--she heard them being silly as they came out. No wonder he looked resigned. She could have wept with chagrin at her inarticulateness, her want of real education, her incapacity for getting her thoughts torn away from their confusion and safely landed into speech. And there stood Robert, waiting, with that air of patience.... But how odd it was, the difference between his talk before she was going to have a baby and his silence--surely resigned silence--when she was! She wished she knew more about husbands. She wished that during the years at home instead of writing all those diocesan letters she had ripely reflected on the Conjugalities.