She looked at him and shook her head.
"I don't think reconciled is quite the—" She paused, thinking. "To what?" she went on. "To puniness, too?"
The two ladies faltered in their conversation, and glanced at Ingeborg, and then at each other.
"Perhaps not to puniness. You are not a pastor."
There was a distinct holding of the breath of the two ladies. The German gentleman's slow speech fell very clearly on their sudden silence.
"No," said Ingeborg. "But what has that—"
"I am. And it is a puny life."
Ingeborg felt a slight curdling. She thought of her father—also, if you come to that, a pastor. She was sure there was nothing in anything he ever did that would strike him as puny. His life was magnificent and important, filled to bursting point with a splendid usefulness and with a tendency to fill the lives of every one who came within his reach to their several bursting points, too. But he, of course, was a prince of the Church. Still, he had gone through the Church's stages, beginning humbly; yet she doubted whether at any moment of his career he had looked at it and thought it puny. And was it not indeed the highest career of all? However breathless and hurried it made one's female relations in its upper reaches, and drudging in its lower, the very highest?
But though she was curdled she was interested.
"It might not be amiss," continued the pastor, looking out of the window at some well-farmed land they were passing, "if it were not for the Sundays."