Indeed, this failure of Ingeborg's entirely spoilt the visit. The Baroness, who had arrived friendly, withdrew into frost with the manner of one who felt she had been thawed on the last occasion on false pretences. Impossible to meet one's pastor's wife—and such an odd-looking and free-mannered one, too—with any familiarity except on the Christian footing of impending birth or death. A pastor's wife belonged to the class one is only really pleasant with in suffering or guilt. Offended, yet forced to continue the call, the Baroness confined such conversation as she made to questions that had a flavour of hostility: where was it possible to get such shoes, and did the Frau Pastor think toes so narrow good for the circulation and the housework?
Ingeborg could not believe this was the motherly lady who had fussed round her bed that day at Glambeck. She felt set away at a great distance from her, on the other side of a gulf. For the first time it was borne in upon her that her marriage made a difference to her socially, that here in Germany the gulf was a wide one. She was a pastor's wife; and when asked about her family, which happened early and searchingly in the call, could only give an impression of more pastors.
"Ah, that is the same as what we call superintendent," said the Baroness, nodding several times slowly on learning that Ingeborg's father was a bishop; and after a series of questions as to the Frau Pastor's sister's marriage nodded her head slowly several times again, and informed Ingeborg that what her sister had married was a schoolmaster. "Like Herr Schultz," said the Baroness—Herr Schultz being the village schoolmaster.
There was a photograph of Judith on the table that caught and kept the Baroness's eye and also, in an even greater but more careful degree, the Baron's. It was Judith dressed in evening beauty, bare-necked, perfect.
Ingeborg took it up with a natural pride in having such a lovely thing for her very own sister and handed it to the Baroness.
"Here she is," said Ingeborg, full of natural pride.
The Baroness stared in real consternation.
"What?" she said. "This is a schoolmaster's wife? This is our pastor's sister-in-law? I had thought—"
She broke off, and with a firm gesture put the photograph on the table again and said she could not stay to supper.
Since then there had been no intercourse with Glambeck, and the Baroness did not know of the satisfactory turn things had taken at the parsonage till on Christmas Eve, from her gallery in church to which she and the Baron had decided to return on the greater festivals as a mark of their awareness that Herr Dremmel desired to make amends, she beheld during the drawn-out verses of the chorale Ingeborg drop sideways on the seat in her pew below and remain motionless and bunched up, her hymn-book pushed crooked on the desk in front of her, and her attitude one of complete indifference to appearances.