But the pastor--his name was Dremmel, he told Ingeborg: Robert
Dremmel--took everything that happened with simplicity. They might shut
him out, and he would never notice it; they might turn their backs, and
he would never know. Nothing that Dent's Tour could do in the way of
ostracizing would have been able to pierce through to his consciousness.
Having decided that the women of it were plain and the men uninteresting
he thought of them no more. With his customary single-mindedness he
concentrated his attention at first only on Switzerland, which was what
he was paying to see, and he found it pleasant that the young lady in
grey should so naturally join him in this concentration. Just for a few
hours at the very beginning he had thought her naturalness, her ready
friendliness, a little unwomanly. She was, he thought, a little too
productive of an impression that she was a kind of boy. She had no
self-consciousness, which he had been taught by his mother to confound
with modesty, and no desire whatever apparently to please the opposite
sex. She went to sleep, for instance, towards the end of the long
journey right in front of him, letting her mouth open if it wanted to,
and not bothering at all that he should probably be looking at it.
Herr Dremmel, who besides his agricultural researches prided himself on
a liberal if intermittent interest in womanly charm, regretted these
shortcomings, but only for a few hours at the very beginning. By the end
of the first day in Lucerne he was finding it pleasant to pair off with
her, womanly or unwomanly. He liked to talk to her. He discovered he
could talk to her as he had been unable to talk to the few East Prussian
young ladies he had met, in spite of the stiff intensity of their desire
to please him. He searched about for a reason, and concluded that it was
because she was interested. Whatever subject he discoursed upon she
came, so it seemed, running to meet him. She listened intelligently, and
with a pliability--he did not then know about the Bishop's
training--rarely to be found in combination with intelligence.
Intelligent persons are very apt, he remembered, to argue and object.
This young lady was intelligent without argument, a most comfortable
compound, and before a definite opinion had a graceful knack of doubling
up. And if her doublings up were at all, as they sometimes were, delayed
while she put in "But--" he only needed repeat with patience to bring
out an admirable submissive sunniness. He could not of course know of
her severe training in sunniness.
By the end of the second day he had told her more about his life and his
home and his work and his ambitions than he had ever told anybody, and
she had told him, only he was unable to find that so interesting, about
her life and her home and her work. She had no ambitions, she explained,
which he said was well in a woman. He was hardly aware of the Bishop, so
lightly did she skim over him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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