"I think it's much funnier of you," said Ingeborg, picking up a pencil out of a rut in the sand and adding it to the pile he was making against the trunk of the nearest tree. "And I'm only going home."
"Home?"
He undid the pile and began again. He had got it wrong. The camp-stool, of course, must be the foundation, then the smaller fly-away things, then, neatly folded and tucking them all in, the mackintosh. She must be an English governess or superior nurse on a neighbouring estate since she talked of home. If so he did not want to go with her; nothing he could think of seemed to him quite so tiresome as an English governess or superior nurse.
He finished tucking in the mackintosh and turned round and took the sketch from her. He was, she perceived, a long, thin-necked man with a short red beard. She was, he perceived, somebody in a badly fitting tweed coat and skirt, a person with a used sort of nose and weak eyes.
"Now then," he said, "I'll go with you anyhow to the end of the avenue. Where is home?"
"Kökensee," said Ingeborg, trotting to keep up with him. "It's the next village. I'm the pastor's wife."
Ingram—for it was that celebrated artist, then at thirty-five, already known all over Europe as more especially and letting alone his small exquisite things a surprising, indeed a disturbingly surprising painter of portraits—glanced down at her and stepped out more vigorously. "That's an amusing thing to be," he said. "And quite new."
"It isn't very new. I've been it eighteen months. Why do you think it's amusing?"
"It's different from anything else. Nobody was ever a pastor's wife in—what did you call it?—before."
"Kökensee."