"You treat me as if I had it."
Anna said nothing. "Why does she stay here? How can she stay here, after what has happened?" she had wondered often. Perhaps she had come now to announce her departure. She prepared herself therefore to listen with a willing ear.
She was sitting in the shade of a copper beech facing the oily sea and the coast of Rügen quivering opposite in the heat-haze. She was not doing anything; she never did seem to do anything, as these ladies of the busy fingers often noticed.
"Blue and white," said Anna, looking up at the gulls and the sky to give Frau von Treumann time, "the Pomeranian colours. I see now where they come from."
But Frau von Treumann had not come out to talk about the Pomeranian colours. "My Karlchen has been ill," she said, her eyes on Anna's face.
Anna watched the gulls overhead in the deep blue. "So has Else," she remarked.
"Dear me," thought Frau von Treumann, "what rancour."
She laid her hand on Anna's knee, and it was taken no notice of. "You cannot forgive him?" she said gently. "You cannot pardon a momentary indiscretion?"
"I have nothing to forgive," said Anna, watching the gulls; one dropped down suddenly, and rose again with a fish in its beak, the sun for an instant catching the silver of the scales. "It is no affair of mine. It is for Else to forgive him."
Frau von Treumann began to weep; this way of looking at it was so hopelessly unreasonable. She pulled out her handkerchief. "What a heap she must use," thought Anna; never had she met people who cried so much and so easily as the Chosen; she was quite used now to red eyes; one or other of her sisters had them almost daily, for the farther their old bodily discomforts and real anxieties lay behind them the more tender and easily lacerated did their feelings become.