It was very unfortunate, but they could not be got, for instance, to like the heavenly bodies. Useless for their mother to press them upon their notice on clear evenings when all the sky was a-blink. From first to last they saw nothing in the sunsets that lit the white winter world into a vast cave of colour except a sign that it must be tea-time. Not once could they be induced to shudder at the thought, on great starry nights, of infinite space. They were unmoved by the information that they were being hurled at an incredible speed through it; and they didn't mind the moon being all those miles away. In the dancing class it was Ingeborg who danced. In the gymnastic class it was she who grew lissom. The English and German Chatting, owing to an absence in Robertlet and Ditti of any of the ingredients of chat, was a monologue; and for the course on Introductions to Insects Collected in the House it was Ingeborg who caught the flies.
They were, however, very good. Nothing to which they were subjected altered that. When their mother in spite of discouragements went on bravely, so did they. When out of doors she snowballed them they stood patiently till she had done. She showed them how to make a snow man, and they did not complain. She gave them little sledges at Christmas, and explained the emotions to be extracted from these objects by sliding on them swiftly down slopes, and they bore her no ill-will when, having slid, they fell off, but quietly preferred the level garden paths and drew each other in turn on one sledge up and down them, while their mother on the other sledge did the sorts of things they had come to expect from mothers, and kept on disappearing over the brink of the slope to the frozen lake head first and face downward.
"It's very difficult," thought Ingeborg sometimes, as the winter dragged on.
There she was, heavy with facts about flies and stars and distances extracted in the evenings during her preparation hours from the "Encyclopædia Britannica" which had been procured from London for the purpose—the parsonage groaned beneath it—and longing to unload them, and she was not able to because the two vessels which ought to have received them were fitted so impenetrably with lids.
They seemed to grow, if anything, more lidded. Quieter and quieter. The hour at the end of the day, marked on the plan Lap, an hour she had thought might easily become beautiful, something her children would remember years hence, which was to have been all white intimacy, with kisses and talks about angels and the best and quickest ways of getting to heaven while Robertlet sat in the lap on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Ditti sat in it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (there being scarcity in laps), was from the beginning an hour of semi-somnolence for the children, of staring sleepily into the glow of the stove, resting while they waited for what their mother would do or say next.
Ingeborg was inclined to be disheartened at this hour. It was the last one of the children's day, and the day had been long. There was the firelight, the mother's lap and knee, the mother herself ready to kiss and be confided in and more than ready to confide in her turn those discoveries she had made in the regions of science, and nothing happened. Robertlet and Ditti either stared fixedly at the glow from the open stove door or at Ingeborg herself; but whichever they stared at they did it in silence.
"What are you thinking of?" she would ask them sometimes, disturbing their dreamless dream, their happy freedom from thought. And then together they would answer, "Nothing."
"No, but tell me really—you can't really think of nothing. It's impossible. Nothing is"—she floundered—"is always something—."
But the next time she asked the same question they answered with one voice just as before, "Nothing."
Then it occurred to her that perhaps they were having too much mother. This also happened in the hour called Lap.