"But, Robert, he's great—he's very great—"
Herr Dremmel, with a wetted thumb, diligently rearranged his pages.
"But—why, I told him you'd love to see him. What am I to say to him if you don't come?"
Herr Dremmel, his eye caught by a sentence he had written, was reading with a deep enormous appetite.
"Tea," said Ingeborg desperately. "There's tea. You always do come to tea. It'll be ready in a minute."
He looked up at her, gathering her into his consciousness again. "Tea?" he said.
But even as he said it his thoughts fell off to his problem, and without removing his eyes from hers he began carefully to consider a new aspect of it that in that instant had occurred to him.
There was nothing for it but to go away. So she went.