“Yes. Isn’t that what you’ve got it down for?”
“No.”
“What are you going to do with it, then?”
Mar seemed not to hear. He turned his back on the rocking-chair, and propped the map up in front of him, against the mucilage pot, very much as his wife had propped Eckermann for his regular Saturday conversation with Gœthe.
But Mrs. Mar was never inclined to let her observations go by ignored. “I can hardly suppose you want to have it lumbering up the place here any longer.” As still he took no notice, “It certainly isn’t decorative.” A pause long enough for him to defend it, if he’d been going to. “Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s the good of keeping it.”
“Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s the harm.”
She could, easily, but she forbore.
She only agitated the rocking-chair yet more violently, clashed her knitting-needles as she turned the stocking in her quick, competent hands, and with a glance at the clock said briskly, as the door opened: “Come, come, Hildegarde. You’re nearly three minutes behind time.”
The girl carried her bowl of roses over to her father’s open window, and set it carefully down. Hildegarde was the one person in the world Mrs. Mar never seemed to fluster. As the girl’s eye fell on the big envelop addressed in Mar’s bold writing, “Oh!” she said, pausing, “have you been hearing again?”
“Hearing what?” came sharply from the swaying figure on the other side of the room.