At the moment I was so much engaged mentally reprobating the way in which she was lying back in a low garden chair with one foot crossed over the other and both feet encased in such thin stockings that they might just as well not have been stockings at all, that I did not immediately notice the otherwise striking expression, “Come.” “Go” would of course have been the usual and expected form; but the substitution, I repeat, escaped me at the moment because of my attention being otherwise engaged. I never
I never saw such little shoes
saw such little shoes. Has a woman a right to be conspicuous at the extremities? So conspicuous—Frau von Eckthum’s hands also easily become absorbing—that one is unable connectedly to follow the conversation? I doubt it: but she is an attractive lady. There sat Edelgard, straight and seemly, the perfect flower of a stricter type of virtuous German womanhood, her feet properly placed side by side on the grass and clothed, as I knew, in decent wool with the flat-heeled boots of the Christian gentlewoman, and I must say the type—in one’s wife, that is—is preferable. I rather wondered whether Flitz noticed the contrast between the two ladies. I glanced at him, but his face was as usual a complete blank. I wondered whether he could or could not make his sister sit up if he had wished to; and for the hundredth time I felt I never could really like the man, for from the point of view of a brother one’s sister should certainly sit up. She is, however, an attractive lady: alas that her stockings should be so persistently thin.
“England,” I heard Edelgard saying, “is not, I think, a suitable place.”
It was then that I consciously noticed that Frau von Eckthum had said “Come.”
“Why not?” she asked; and her simple way of asking questions, or answering them with others of her own without waiting to adorn them or round them off with the title of the person addressed, has helped, I know, to make her unpopular in Storchwerder society.
“I have heard,” said Edelgard cautiously, no doubt bearing in mind that to hosts whose sister had married an Englishman and was still living with him one would not say all one would like to about it, “I have heard that it is not a place to go to if the object is scenery.”
“Oh?” said Frau von Eckthum. Then she added—intelligently, I thought—“But there always is scenery.”