"It seems to me—" she whispered and stopped.
"What seems to you a second time?"
"That there is something going on in this house—"
Irene frowned.
"What an imagination you have! You are ever imagining something uncommon. Now all these uncommon things are painted pots, or illusions. Life rolls on always in a common, prosaic movement. Stop making painted pots, and go out to walk with Puff and Miss Mary."
Cara listened attentively, but with an incredulous expression of eyes, which were fixed on her sister's face.
"Very well, I will go to walk, but what you have said is not true, Ira. It is not painted pots that mamma is suffering and sick, that father goes out to dine for a whole week, and does not come to her at all; even that—man, going out to-day, began to cry in the antechamber—I saw him by chance—he wanted to say something to me, but I ran away—"
Irene shrugged her shoulders.
"You will be a poetess, perhaps, you exaggerate everything so terribly. Mamma is not troubled, she only has neuralgia. Father does not dine with us because he has so many invitations, and Pan Kranitski struck his nose against something which you, in poetic imagination, took for crying. Men never cry, and sensible girls, instead of filling their heads with painted pots, go to walk while good weather lasts and the sun shines. The doctor tells you to walk every day, not in the evening, but about this hour."
"I am going, I am going! You drive me away!"