Mrs. Menzies-Legh: “But Herr Pastor, not at all. Truly not at all. Will you not allow me to pour you out even half a glassful? After the heat of your walk? And the exertion of conducting the church service?”
Pastor, struggling to get up from the low chair, bow, and take the proffered glass of milk at one and the same time: “Since the gracious one is so gracious——”
He takes the glass with a deep bow, having now reached the stage when, the preliminaries demanded by perfect courtesy being on each side fulfilled, he is at liberty to do so, but before drinking its contents turns bowing to Menzies-Legh.
Pastor: “But may I not be permitted to offer it to the Herr Graf?”
Menzies-Legh, with a stately wave of the hand: “No—no.”
Pastor, letting himself down again into the chair with another bow and the necessary caution, the glass being in his hand: “I do not dare to think what the Herrschaften’s opinion of me must be for intruding in this manner. I can only entreat them not to take it amiss. I am aware it is an unexampled example of shamelessness——”
Mrs. Menzies-Legh, advancing with the plate of biscuits: “Will the Herr Pastor perhaps eat a biscuit?”
The pastor again shows every sign of being overcome with gratitude, and is about to embark on a speech of thanks and protest before permitting himself to take one when Baron von Ottringel and party appear on the scene, and we get to the point at which they really did appear.
Now what could be more proper and graceful than the whole of the above? It will be observed that there has been no time whatever for anything but politeness, no time to embark on those seas of discussion, sometimes foolish, often unsuitable, and always sooner or later angry, on which an otherwise budding acquaintanceship so frequently comes to grief. We Germans of the upper classes do not consider it good form to talk on any subject that is likely to make us lose our tempers, so what can we talk about? There is hardly anything really safe, except to offer each other chairs. But used as I am to these gilt limits, elegant frames within which it is a pleasure to behave like a picture (my friends will have noticed and pardoned my liking for metaphor) it will easily be imagined with what disapproval I stood leaning on my umbrella watching the scene before me. Frau von Eckthum had gone into her caravan. Edelgard and the girls had disappeared. I alone approached the party, not one of which thought it necessary to introduce me or take other notice of my arrival.
They were discussing with amusing absorption a subject alluded to as the Licensing Bill, which was, I gathered, something heating to do with beer, and were weaving into it all sorts of judgments and opinions that would have inflamed a group of Germans at once. Menzies-Legh was too much interested, I suppose, to go on being green, anyhow, his greenness was all gone; and the pastor sawed up and down with his hand, in which he clasped the biscuit no one had suggested he should take. Mrs. Menzies-Legh, sitting on the grass (a thing no lady should ever do when a gentleman she sees for the first time is present—“May she the second time?” asked Mrs. Menzies-Legh, when I laid this principle down in the course of a later conversation, to which I very properly replied that you cannot explain nuances, but only feel them), joined in just as though she were a man herself—I mean, with her usual air of unchallenged equality of intelligence, an air that would have diverted me if it had not annoyed me too much. And they treated her, too, as though she were an equal, listening attentively to what she had to say, which, of course, inflates a poor woman and makes it difficult for her to arrive at a right estimate of herself.