This completed her cure. An enormous courage took the place of her misgivings. She rose up from the sofa so superfluously brave, so glowing with enterprise, that she wanted to begin at once that she might show how much she could cheerfully endure. "As though," she said, lifting her chin, "I couldn't stand what other women stand—as though I wouldn't stand anything sooner than hurt my baby!" And she flung back her head in the proudest defiance of whatever might be ahead of her.
Her baby, her husband, her happy home—to suffer for these would be beautiful if it were not such a little thing, almost too little to offer up at their dear altar. She would have been transfigured by her shining thoughts if any thing could have transfigured her, but no thoughts however bright could pierce through that sad body. Her outlines were not the outlines for heroic attitudes. She not only had a double chin, she seemed to be doubled all over. She looked the queerest figure, heavy, middle-aged, uncouth, ugly, standing there passionately expressing her readiness to begin; and Herr Dremmel unconsciously seeing this, and bored by having had to explain the obvious at such length and spend a valuable half hour bringing a woman to reason—why could they never go to it by themselves?—wasted no more words having got her there, but brushed a hasty kiss across her hair and went away looking at his watch.
And next day, just as she was putting the potatoes into that dinner-pot that so much simplified her cooking, she uttered a small exclamation and turned quickly to Ilse with a look of startled questioning.
"Geht's los?" asked Ilse, pausing in the wiping dry of a wooden ladle.
"I—don't know," said Ingeborg, gasping a little. "No," she added after a minute, during which they stood staring at each other, "it wasn't anything."
And she went on with the potatoes.
But when presently there was another little fluttering exclamation, Ilse, with great decision, laid down her gloomy drying-cloth and sought out Johann, Herr Dremmel not having come in, and bade him harness the horses and fetch Frau Dosch.
"The first thing," said Frau Dosch, arriving two hours later, surprisingly brisk and business-like considering her age and the heat, "the first thing is to plait your hair in two plaits."
And still later, when Ingeborg had left off pretending or trying to be anything at all, when courage and unselfishness and stoicism and a desire to please Robert—who was Robert?—were like toys for drawing-room games, shoved aside in these grips with death, Frau Dosch nodded her head philosophically while she ate and drank from the trays Ilse kept on bringing her, and said at regular intervals, "Ja, ja—was sein muss sein muss."
Such were the consolations of Frau Dosch.