Then it occurred to her that perhaps they were having too much mother. This also happened in the hour called Lap. "A mother," she reflected, both her arms round her children according to plan, "must often be rather a nuisance." She looked down with a new sympathy at Ditti's head reposing, also according to plan, on her shoulder. "Especially if she's a devoted mother." She laid her cheek on the black smooth hair, parted and pigtailed and as unlike Robert's fair furry stuff or her own as it was like the elder Frau Dremmel's. "A devoted mother," continued Ingeborg to herself, her eyes on the glowing heart of the stove and her cheek on Ditti's head, "is one who gives up all her time to trying to make her children different." "_I'm_ a devoted mother," she added, after a pause in which she had faced her conscience. "How dreadful!" she thought. She began to kiss Ditti's head very softly. "How, too, dreadful to be in the power of somebody different; of somebody quick if you're not quick, or dull if you're not dull, and anyhow so old, so very old compared to you, and have to be made like her! How would I like being in my mother-in-law's power, with years and years for her to work at forcing me to be what she'd think I ought to be? And what she'd think I ought to be would be herself, what she tries to be. Of course. You can't think outside yourself." She drew the children tighter. "You _poor_ little things!" she exclaimed aloud, suddenly overcome by the vision of what it must be like to have to put up with a person so fundamentally alien through a whole winter; and she kissed them one after the other, holding their faces close to hers with her hands against their cheeks in a passion of apology. Even to that exclamation, a quite new one in a quite new voice, they said nothing, but waited patiently for what would no doubt happen next. CHAPTER XXVI What happened next was that they went to school. Just as Ingeborg was beginning to ask herself rather shy questions--for she was very full of respects--about the value of education and the claims of free development, the State stepped in and swept Robertlet and Ditti away from her into its competent keeping. In an instant, so it seemed to her afterward when in the empty house she had nothing to do but put away their traces, she was bereft. "You never told me _this_ is what happens to mothers," she said to Herr Dremmel the day the brief order from the Chief Inspector of Schools arrived. Herr Dremmel, who was annoyed that he should have forgotten his parental and civic duties, and still more annoyed, it being April and his fields needing much attention as a new-born infant, or a young woman one wishes, impelled by amorous motives, to marry, that there should be parental and civic duties to forget, was short with her. "Every German of six has to be educated," he said. "But they _are_ being educated," said Ingeborg, her mind weighted with all she herself had learned. He waved her aside.