Ingram's visit to the Glambecks, had in any case been coming to an end the next day, when he was to have gone to Königsberg on his way to the Caucasus, a place he hoped might trick him by its novelty for at least a time out of boredom, and the Baron and Baroness were greatly surprised when he told them he was not going to the Caucasus but to Kökensee instead.
With one voice they exclaimed, "Kökensee?"
"To paint the pastor's wife's hair," said Ingram.
The Baron and Baroness were silent. The explanation seemed to them beyond comment. Its disreputableness robbed them of speech. Herr Ingram, of course, an artist of renown—if he had not been of very great renown they could not have seen their way to admitting him on terms of equality into their circle—might paint whoever's hair he pleased; but was there not some ecclesiastical law forbidding that the hair of one's pastor's wife should be painted? To have one's hair painted when one was a pastor's wife was hardly more respectable than having it dyed. People of family were painted in order to hand down their portrait to succeeding generations, but you had to have generations, you had to have scions, you had to have a noble stock for the scions to spring from, and the painting was entered into soberly, discreetly, advisedly, in the fear of God, for the delectation of children, not lightly or wantonly, not for effect, not, as Herr Ingram had added of Frau Pastor's hair, because any portion of one's person was strangely beautiful. Strangely beautiful? They looked at each other; and the Baroness raised her large and undulating white hands from her black lap for a moment and let them drop on to it again, and the Baron slowly nodded his entire agreement.
Ingram had found a room in the village inn at Kökensee, a place so sordid, so entirely impossible as the next habitation after theirs for one who had been their guest, that the Baron and Baroness were concerned for what their servants must think when they heard him direct their coachman in the presence of their butler and footman, as he clambered nimbly into the dogcart, to take him to it. And the Baroness went in and wrote at once to her son Hildebrand in Berlin, who had introduced Ingram to Glambeck, and told him she did not intend permitting Herr Ingram to visit her again. "To please you," she wrote, "I did it. But how true it is that these artists can never rise beyond being artists! I have finished with outsiders, however clever. Give me gentlemen."
She did not mention, she found she could not mention, the hair; and to the Baron that evening she expressed the hope that at least the picture would only be in watercolour. Watercolour, she felt, seemed somehow nearer the Commandments than oils.
It was impossible to paint a serious picture of Ingeborg in the dark little parlour at the parsonage, and as there was no other room at all that they could use Ingram began a series of sketches of her out of doors, in the garden, in the punt, anywhere and everywhere.
"I must get some idea of you," he said, perceiving that a reason for his coming every day had to be provided. "Later on I'll do the real picture. In a proper studio."
"I wonder how I'll get to a proper studio?" smiled Ingeborg.
"I've got a very good one in Venice. You must sit to me there."