"A mother," she reflected, both her arms round her children according to plan, "must often be rather a nuisance."
She looked down with a new sympathy at Ditti's head reposing, also according to plan, on her shoulder.
"Especially if she's a devoted mother."
She laid her cheek on the black smooth hair, parted and pigtailed and as unlike Robert's fair furry stuff or her own as it was like the elder Frau Dremmel's.
"A devoted mother," continued Ingeborg to herself, her eyes on the glowing heart of the stove and her cheek on Ditti's head, "is one who gives up all her time to trying to make her children different."
"I'm a devoted mother," she added, after a pause in which she had faced her conscience.
"How dreadful!" she thought.
She began to kiss Ditti's head very softly.
"How, too, dreadful to be in the power of somebody different; of somebody quick if you're not quick, or dull if you're not dull, and anyhow so old, so very old compared to you, and have to be made like her! How would I like being in my mother-in-law's power, with years and years for her to work at forcing me to be what she'd think I ought to be? And what she'd think I ought to be would be herself, what she tries to be. Of course. You can't think outside yourself."
She drew the children tighter. "You poor little things!" she exclaimed aloud, suddenly overcome by the vision of what it must be like to have to put up with a person so fundamentally alien through a whole winter; and she kissed them one after the other, holding their faces close to hers with her hands against their cheeks in a passion of apology.