She would have been quite frightened if she had been less well trained by the Bishop in unimportance. She had, however, owing to this training, left off being shy years before. She had so small an opinion of herself that there was no room in her at all for self-consciousness; and she arrived at the Glambecks' in her usual condition of excessive naturalness, ready to talk, ready to be pleased and interested. But it was conveyed to her instantly on seeing the Baroness--there was an astonishment in the way she looked at her--that her clothes were not right. And just the request or suggestion or demand--she did not know which of these it really was--that she should take off her hat, made her realise she was on new ground, in places where the webs of strange customs were thick about her feet. She was, for a moment, very nearly frightened. "You will be more comfortable," said the Baroness, "without your hat." She took it off obediently, glancing beneath her eyelashes, as she drew out the pins, at the Baroness's smooth black head and unwrinkled black body, perceiving with the clearness of a revelation that that was how she ought to look herself. Skimpier, of course, for the years had not yet had their will with her, but she ought to be a version of the effect done in lean. She resolved, in her thirst after fulfilled duty, to get a black dress and practise. She thought it wisest not to think what her hair must be looking like when her hat was off, for she had not expected to be hatless, and well did she know it by nature for a straggler, a thing inclined to wander from the grasp of hairpins and go off on its own account into wantonings and rings which were all the more conspicuous because of their lurid approach in colouring to the beards of her ancestors--sun-kissed Scandinavians who walked the earth in their strength hung, according to the way the light took them, with beards that were either the colour of flames, or of apricots, or of honey. Well, if they _would_ make her take her hat off.... By the time she was on the sofa she was presently put on in the inner hall she had caught up with her usual condition of naturalness again, and sat on it interested and forgetful of self. The Baroness's eyes wandered over her, and they wandered over her with much the same quality in their look that had been in her mother-in-law's. And always when they got to her feet they lingered. Her skirt again reached only to her ankles. All her outdoor skirts did that. "But I can't help _having_ feet," thought Ingeborg, noticing this. They were small by nature, and the artful shoes of the London shoemaker who had shared in providing her and Judith's trousseau made them seem still smaller. She did not try to hide them as she had tried when Frau Dremmel stared. It was Frau Dremmel's heavy silence that had unnerved her. These people talked; and the Baroness's English was reassuringly good.