Richard laughed, and so did Martella quite heartily.
There is nothing better than when two people laugh together at their first meeting.
Later in the season, my daughter Johanna, who is the wife of a pastor in the Oberland who had once been Ludwig's teacher, came with her grown-up daughter to pay us a visit. Johanna's object in coming was to receive the benefit of the milk cure.
At their very first meeting, she unintentionally affronted Martella. Johanna always wore black silk netted gloves, and when, with too evident an air of assumed kindness, she offered her hand to Martella, the latter said to her:
"There is no need for a fly-net on your hand. I do not sting."
After this trifling circumstance, there was many a heart-burning between Martella and Johanna. They were always at cross purposes. Rothfuss was provoked, as he was unable to satisfy Martella that the pastor's wife had not intended to affront her. Martella refused to be convinced, and persisted in calling Johanna a "fly-net."
When she had once conceived an aversion for any one, she was immovable. And when Johanna came to the cow stables, which she did twice every day at milking-time, she would always in an ironical tone say, "Good-day, madam sister-in-law."
Johanna found in this a cause for continued ill-feeling, to which, in her discontented and susceptible condition, she readily gave way.
Johanna imagined that she had found the way to Martella's heart, by assuring her how much she pitied her. But that only served to make matters worse; for Martella resented any manifestation of pity.
As our household was conducted on a generous scale, there was much that, in Johanna's eyes, contrasted unpleasantly with her own home. She frequently alluded to the small pay her husband was earning, and often gave us cause to remember that he would have been advanced much more rapidly, if he had not been the son-in-law of a member of the party in opposition to the government. She, in fact, made no concealment of her belief that I was the cause of her husband's and her daughter's infirm health. If it were not that I was in such great disfavor with the government, they would long ago have been stationed in a more genial climate, and would thus have recovered their health.