She laughed. She stood on the top step with the light of the lamp in the passage behind her, a little torch of resolution and adventure and imagination well let loose. "I'm going to Italy," she said, flinging out both her arms as though she would put them round that land of dreams; and so complex is man and so simple in his complexity that Ingram went away in the wet twilight quite sincerely offering thanks to God. But when it came to the moment of telling Robert about Berlin and shopping, her heart beat very uncomfortably. It was at tea-time the next afternoon. All day she had been trying to do it, but her tongue refused. At breakfast she tried, and at dinner she tried, and in between she went twice to the laboratory door and stood on the mat, and instead of going in went away again on the carefullest toe-tips. And there was Ingram getting to Berlin, got to Berlin, kicking his heels there waiting.... At tea-time, after a tempestuous walk in the wet during which, as she splashed through sodden miles of sad-coloured wilderness, she took her gods to witness that the thing should be done that afternoon, she did finally bring it out. She had meant to say with an immense naturalness that she wished to go to Berlin in order to buy boots. She had thought of boots as simple objects, quickly bought and resembling each other; not like hats or dresses which might lead later on to explanations. And she needed boots. She really would buy them. It would, she felt, help her to be natural if what she said so far as it went were true. But so greatly was she chagrined in her soul that she should have to talk of boots at all instead of telling him, her Robert, her after all _kind_ Robert, with delight of Italy and of her discoveries in beautiful new feelings, that when she had gulped and cleared her throat and gulped again and opened her mouth she found herself not talking of boots nor yet of Berlin, but addressing him with something of the indignant irrelevance of a suffragette who because she has been forcibly fed demands the vote. He had, as his custom was, brought literature with him, and was sitting bent over his cup with the book propped against the hot-water jug. It was called _Eliminierung der Minusvarianten_, and was apparently, as all the books he brought to meals also were apparently, absorbing. The sound of the dripping of the rain on the ivy was unbroken at first except by the sound of Herr Dremmel drinking his tea, and the room was so gloomy under the pall of heavy sky that almost one needed a lamp. "You see," said Ingeborg, most of the blood in her body surging up into her face as she suddenly, after ten minutes' silent struggle, leaned across the table and plunged into the inevitable, "my feeling so uncomfortable about a simple thing like this is really the measure of the subjection of women."