The Pastor's Wife

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

There was now nothing left for Ingeborg but, as she told Herr Dremmel the first Sunday Robertlet and Ditti had been coming home and then for some obscure reason did not come, thrusting the information tactlessly at tea-time between his attention and his book, her own inside.

"After all," she said, as usual quite suddenly, breaking a valuable silence, "there's still me."

Herr Dremmel said nothing, for it was one of those statements of fact that luckily do not require an answer.

"Nobody," said Ingeborg, throwing her head back a little, "can take that away."

Herr Dremmel said nothing to that either, chiefly because he did not want to. He had no time nor desire to guess at meanings which were, no doubt, after all not there.

"Whatever happens," she said, "I've still got my own inside."

"Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "I will not ask you what you mean in case you should tell me."

There was a drought going on, and Herr Dremmel, who justly prided himself on his sweetness of temper, was not as patient as usual; so Ingeborg, silenced, went into the garden where the drought was making the world glow and shimmer, and reflected that on the object she called her inside alone now depended her happiness.

It was useless to depend on others; it was useless to depend, as she had done in her ridiculous vanity, on others depending on her. After all, each year had a May in it and the birds sang. She would send away the extra servant and do the work herself, as she used to at first. She would begin again to develop her intelligence, and write that evening to London for the Spectator. Something, she remembered, had warmed and quickened her all those years ago after her meeting with Ingram—was it the Spectator? She would make plans. She would draw up plans in red ink. There were a thousand things she might study. There were languages.

She walked up and down the garden. If she let herself be beaten back this time into neglect of herself and indifference she would be done for. There was no one to save her. She would lapse and lapse; and not into fatnesses and peace like other women in Germany lopped of their children, and of a class above the class that stood at that instrument of salvation, its own washtub, not into afternoon slumbers and benevolences of a woolly nature that kept one's hand knitting while one's brains went to sleep till presently one was dead, but into something fretful and nipped, with a little shrivelled, skinny, steadily dwindling mind.