'Nay, I fear thee, Heinrich,' said Papa. 'I fear thy tongue applied to my weak places. I fear thine eye, measuring their deficiencies. I fear thy intelligence, known to be great—'
'Worth exactly,' said Onkel Heinrich suddenly facing us, the cigarbox under his arm, his cross owl's eyes rounder than ever, 'worth exactly, on the Berlin brain market, eight thousand marks a year.'
'I know, I know,' cried Papa, 'and I admire—I admire. But there is awe mingled with my admiration, Heinrich,—awe, respect, terror. Go, thou man of brains and marketableness, thou man of worth and recognition, go and leave me here with these lesser intellects. I fear thee, and I will not watch thee smoke.'
And he got up and raised Tante Else's hand to his lips with great gallantry and wished her, after our pleasant fashion at the end of meals, a good digestion.
But Tante Else, though she tried to smile and return his wishes, could not get back again into her rôle of serene and conversational Hausfrau. My uncle waddled away, shooting a sniff of scorn over his shoulder as he went, and my aunt endeavored to conceal the fact that she was wiping her eyes. Lieschen and Elschen began to talk to me both at once. My step-mother cleared her throat, and remarked that successful public men often had to pay for their successes by being the victims at home of nerves, and that their wives, whose duty it is always to be loving, might be compared to the warm and soothing iron passed over a shirt newly washed, and deftly, by its smooth insistence, flattening away each crease.
Papa gazed at my step-mother with admiring astonishment while she elaborated this image. He had hold of Tante Else's hand and was stroking it. His bright eyes were fixed on his wife, and I could see by their expression that he was trying to recall the occasions on which his own creases had been ironed out.
With the correctness with which one guesses most of a person's thoughts after you have lived with him ten years, my step-mother guessed what he was thinking. 'I said public men,' she remarked, 'and I said successes.'
'I heard, I heard, meine Liebste,' Papa assured her, 'and I also completely understand.'
He made her a little bow across the table. 'Do not heed him, Else, my dear,' he added, turning to my aunt. 'Do not heed thy Heinrich—he is but a barbarian.'
'Ferdinand!' exclaimed my step-mother.