He was more near being quite happy during this first week than he could remember to have been since that period of pinafore in which the world is all mother and daisies. He was enjoying the interest of complete contrast, the freshness that lies about beginnings. From this remoteness, this queer intimate German setting, he looked at his usual life as at something entirely foolish, hurried, noisy, and tiresome. All those women--good heavens, all those women--who collected and coagulated about his path, what terrible things they seemed from here! Women he had painted, who rose up and reproached him because his idea of them and their idea were different; women he had fallen in love with, or tried to persuade himself he had fallen in love with, or tried to hope he would presently be able to persuade himself he had fallen in love with; women who had fallen in love with him, and fluffed and flapped about him, monsters of soft enveloping suffocation; women he had wronged--absurd word! women who had claims on him--claims on him! on him who belonged only to art and the universe. And there was his wife--good heavens, yes, his wife.... From these distresses and irksomenesses, from a shouting world, from the crowds and popularity that pushed between him and the one thing that mattered, his work, from the horrors of home life, the horrors of society and vain repetitions of genialities, from all the people who talked about Thought, and Art, and the Mind of the World, from jealousies, affections, praises, passions, excitement, boredom, he felt very safe at Kökensee. To be over there in the middle of the distracting emptiness of London was like having the sour dust of a neglected market-place blown into one's face. To be over here in Kökensee was to feel like a single goldfish in a bowl of clear water. Ingeborg was the clear water. Kökensee was the bowl. For a week he swam with delight in this new element; for a week he felt so good and innocent, exercising himself in its cool translucency, that almost did he seem a goldfish in a bib. Then Ingeborg began to annoy him; and she annoyed him for the precise reason that had till then charmed him, her curious resemblance to a boy. This frank affection, this unconcealed delight in his society, this ever-ready excessive admiration, were arresting at first and amusing and delicious after the sham freshness, the tricks, the sham daring things of the women he had known. They were like a bath at the end of a hot night; like a country platform at the end of a stuffy railway journey. But you cannot sit in a bath all day, or stay permanently on a platform. You do want to go on. You do want things to develop.