By the second day he knew all about her life since her marriage, her six children--they amazed and appalled him--her pursuit, started by him, of culture, her housekeeping, her pride in Robert's cleverness, her solitude, her thirst for some one to talk to. Persons like Ilse and Rosa, Frau Dremmel, Robertlet and Ditti, became extraordinarily real to him. He made little drawings of them while she talked up the edge of his paper. And he also knew, by the second day, all about her life in Redchester, its filial ardours, its duties, its difficulties when it came to disentangling itself from the Bishop; and his paper sprawled up its other edge with tiny bishops and unattached, expressive aprons. The one thing she concealed from him of the larger happenings of her life was Lucerne, but even that he knew after a week. "So you can do things," he said, looking at her with a new interest. "You can do real live things." "Oh, yes. If I'm properly goaded." "I wonder what you mean by properly goaded?" "Well, I was goaded then. Goaded by being kept in one place uninterruptedly for years." "That's what is happening to you now." "Oh, but this is different. And I've been to Zoppot." "Zoppot!" "Besides, _you're_ here." "But I won't be here for ever." "Oh, but you'll be somewhere in the same world." "As though that were any good." "Of course it is. I shall read about you in the papers." "Nonsense," he said crossly. "The papers!" "And I shall curl up in your memory." "As if I were dead. You sometimes really are beyond words ridiculous." "I expect it's because I've had so little education," she said meekly. At tea-time almost every day Herr Dremmel joined them in the garden, and the conversation became stately. The sketches were produced, and he made polite comments. He discussed art with Ingram, and Ingram discussed fertilizers with him, and as neither knew anything about the other's specialty they discussed by force of intelligence. Ingeborg poured out the tea and listened full of pride in them both. She thought how much they must be liking and admiring each other. Robert's sound sense, his quaint and often majestic English, his obviously notable scientific attainments must, she felt sure, deeply impress Ingram. And of course to see and speak to the great Ingram every day could not but give immense gratification to Robert, now that he had become aware of who he was. She sat between the two men in her old-fashioned voluminous white frock, looking from one to the other with eager pride while they talked. She did not say anything herself out of respect for such a combination of brains, but she was all ears. She drank the words in. It was more mind-widening she felt even than the _Clarion_.