It was, however, the only one. After it silence, complete and impenetrable, settled down on Frau Dremmel. She did not even speak to her son when half an hour later he came out in search of the coffee he had failed to find on his doormat. Her manners prevented her, in his house on this first visit after his marriage, from uttering the unmanageable truths that come so naturally from the mouths of neglected mothers; and except for those she had nothing to say to him. Herr Dremmel expected nothing. His deeply engaged thoughts left no room in him for anything but a primitive simplicity. He was hungry, and he ate; thirsty, and he drank. The silent figure at the table, of whose presence every nerve in Ingeborg's body was conscious, produced no impression on him whatever. "Robert--do tell your mother how I really _do_ want to talk to her if only I could," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together in her lap and tying and untying her handkerchief into knots. There were little beads on her upper lip. The rings of hair on her temples were quite damp. He glanced at his mother, drawn up and taut in her chair, and immediately she turned her eyes on to him and stared back at him steadily. "Little One," he said, "I have told you she is a simple woman, not used to or capable of wielding the weapons of social arts. Be simple, too, and all will be well." "But I _am_ being simple," protested Ingeborg. "I'm dumb; I'm blank; what can I be simpler than that?" "Then all is well. Give me coffee." He ate and drank in silence, and got up to go away again. Frau Dremmel looked at him and said something. "Is it the carriage?" asked Ingeborg. "She wants to go indoors," said Herr Dremmel. "Indoors?" "She says she does not like mosquitoes." He went away into the house. There was nothing for it but to follow. As they reached the back door the church clock struck five, but Ingeborg, glancing at her mother-in-law's impassive face, saw this sound meant nothing to her. She followed her into the living-room and watched her helplessly as she arranged herself once more on the sofa. When the clock struck half-past five she was still on it. She seemed to be waiting. For what was she waiting? Ingeborg asked herself, whose handkerchief was now rubbed into a hard ball between her nervous hands. Impossible either to move her or communicate with her. Rigidly she sat, her eyes examining the room and each object in it but yet not for an instant missing the least of her daughter-in-law's movements. Ingeborg seized her dictionary and grammar and made a final effort to build a bridge out of them across which their souls might even now go out to meet each other, but Frau Dremmel did not seem to understand the nature of her efforts, and only stared with a deepened blankness when Ingeborg read her out a sentence from the grammar that dealt with weather they were not that day having.