"No what, dear child?" inquired Frau von Treumann sweetly.
"I cannot send her away."
"You cannot send her away?" they cried together. Both let their work drop into their laps, and both stared blankly at Anna, who looked at the footstool.
"Have you made a lifelong contract with her?" asked Frau von Treumann, with great heat, no such contract having been made in her own case.
"I did not quite say what I mean," said Anna, looking up again. "I do not mean that I cannot really send her away, for of course I can if I choose. Exactly what I mean is that I will not."
There was a pause. Neither of the ladies had expected such an attitude.
"This is very serious," then observed Frau von Treumann helplessly. She took up her work again and pulled at the stitches, making knots in the thread. Both she and the baroness had felt so certain that Anna would be properly incensed when she heard the truth. Her manner without doubt suggested displeasure, but the displeasure, strangely enough, seemed to be directed against themselves instead of Fräulein Kuhräuber. What could they, with dignity, do next? Frau von Treumann felt angry and perplexed. She remembered Karlchen's advice in regard to ultimatums, and wished she had remembered it sooner; but who could have imagined the extent of Anna's folly? Never, she reflected, had she met anyone quite so foolish.
"It is a case for the police," burst out the baroness passionately, all the pride of all the Elmreichs surging up in revolt against a fate threatening to condemn her to spend the rest of her days with the progeny of a postman. "Your advertisement specially mentioned good birth as essential, and she is here under false pretences. You have the proofs in her letters. She is within reach of the arm of the law."
Anna could not help smiling. "Don't denounce her," she said. "I should be appalled if anything approaching the arm of the law got into my house. I'll burn the proofs after dinner." Then she turned to Frau von Treumann. "If you think it over," she said, "I know you will not wish me to be so merciless, so pitiless, as to send Emilie back to misery only because her father, who has been dead thirty years, was a postman."
"But, Anna, you must be reasonable—you must look at the other side. No Treumann has ever yet been required to associate——"