From these distresses and irksomenesses, from a shouting world, from the crowds and popularity that pushed between him and the one thing that mattered, his work, from the horrors of home life, the horrors of society and vain repetitions of genialities, from all the people who talked about Thought, and Art, and the Mind of the World, from jealousies, affections, praises, passions, excitement, boredom, he felt very safe at Kökensee. To be over there in the middle of the distracting emptiness of London was like having the sour dust of a neglected market-place blown into one's face. To be over here in Kökensee was to feel like a single goldfish in a bowl of clear water. Ingeborg was the clear water. Kökensee was the bowl. For a week he swam with delight in this new element; for a week he felt so good and innocent, exercising himself in its cool translucency, that almost did he seem a goldfish in a bib. Then Ingeborg began to annoy him; and she annoyed him for the precise reason that had till then charmed him, her curious resemblance to a boy.
This frank affection, this unconcealed delight in his society, this ever-ready excessive admiration, were arresting at first and amusing and delicious after the sham freshness, the tricks, the sham daring things of the women he had known. They were like a bath at the end of a hot night; like a country platform at the end of a stuffy railway journey. But you cannot sit in a bath all day, or stay permanently on a platform. You do want to go on. You do want things to develop.
Ingram was nettled by Ingeborg's apparent inability to develop. It was all very well, it was charming to be like a boy for a little while, but to persist in it was tiresome. Nothing he could say, nothing he could apply to her in the way of warm and varied epithet, brought the faintest trace of self-consciousness into her eyes. What can be done, he thought, with a woman who will not be self conscious? She received his speeches with enthusiasm, she hailed them with delight and laughter, and, what was particularly disconcerting, she answered back. Answered back with equal warmth and with equal variety—sometimes, he suspected, annoyed at being outdone in epithet, with even more. To judge from her talk she almost made love to him. He would have supposed it was quite making love if he had not known, if he had not been so acutely aware that it was not. With a face of radiance and a voice of joy she would say suddenly that God had been very good to her; and when he asked in what way, would answer earnestly, "In sending you here." And then she would add in that peculiar sweet voice—she certainly had, thought Ingram, a peculiar sweet voice, a little husky, again a little like a choir-boy's, but a choir-boy with a slight sore throat—"I've missed you dreadfully all these years. I've been lonely for you."
And the honesty of her; the honest sincerity of her eyes when she said these things. No choir-boy older than ten could look at one with quite such a straight simplicity.
Every day punctually at two o'clock, by which time the daily convulsion of dinner and its washing up was over at the parsonage, he walked across from his inn, while Kökensee's mouths behind curtains and round doors guttered with excited commentary, telling himself as he gazed down the peaceful street that this was the emptiest, gossip-freest place in the world, to the Dremmel gate; and dodging the various rich puddles of the yard, passed round the corner of the house along the lilac path beneath the laboratory windows to where, at the end of the lime-tree avenue, Ingeborg sat waiting. Then he would sketch her, or pretend to sketch her according as the mood was on him, and they would talk.
By the second day he knew all about her life since her marriage, her six children—they amazed and appalled him—her pursuit, started by him, of culture, her housekeeping, her pride in Robert's cleverness, her solitude, her thirst for some one to talk to. Persons like Ilse and Rosa, Frau Dremmel, Robertlet and Ditti, became extraordinarily real to him. He made little drawings of them while she talked up the edge of his paper. And he also knew, by the second day, all about her life in Redchester, its filial ardours, its duties, its difficulties when it came to disentangling itself from the Bishop; and his paper sprawled up its other edge with tiny bishops and unattached, expressive aprons. The one thing she concealed from him of the larger happenings of her life was Lucerne, but even that he knew after a week.
"So you can do things," he said, looking at her with a new interest. "You can do real live things."
"Oh, yes. If I'm properly goaded."
"I wonder what you mean by properly goaded?"
"Well, I was goaded then. Goaded by being kept in one place uninterruptedly for years."