And for an instant he gave his mind to reflection on how great might be the barrier created between two people living together by a different taste in weather.
Ingram arrived at two o'clock in a state of extreme irritation. He splashed through the farmyard with the collar of his coat turned up and angrily holding an umbrella. In his wet-weather mood it seemed to him entirely absurd and unworthy to be wading through an East Prussian farmyard mess in pouring rain, beneath an umbrella, in order to sit with a woman. He wanted to be at work. He was obsessed by his picture. He was in the fever to begin that seizes the artist after idleness, the fever to get away, to be off back to the real concern of life—the fierce fever of creation. He had not yet had to come into the house on his daily visits, and when he got into the passage he was immediately and deeply offended by the smell that met him of what an hour before had been a German dinner. The smell came out, as it were, weighty with welcome. It advanced en bloc. It was massive, deep, enveloping. The front door stood open, but nothing but great space of time could rid the house in the afternoons of that peculiar and all-pervading smell. He was shocked to think his white and golden one, his little image of living ivory and living gold, must needs on a day like this be swathed about in such fumes, must sit in them and breathe them, and that his communings with her were going to be conducted through a heavy curtain of what seemed to be different varieties of cabbage and all of them malignant.
The narrow gloom of the house, its unpiercedness on that north side by any but the coldest light, its abrupt ending almost at once in the kitchen and servant part, struck him as incredibly, preposterously sordid. What a place to put a woman in! What a place, having put her in it, to neglect her in! The thought of Herr Dremmel's neglects, those neglects that had made his own stay possible and pleasant, infuriated him. How dare he? thought Ingram, angrily wiping his boots.
Herr Dremmel, Kökensee, everything connected with the place except Ingeborg, seemed in his changed mood ignoble. He forgot the weeks of sunshine there had been, the large afternoons in the garden and forest and rye-fields, the floating on great stretches of calm water, and just hated everything. Kökensee was God-forsaken, distant, alien, ugly, dirty, dripping, evil-smelling. Ingeborg herself when she came running out of the parlour to him into the concentrated cabbage of the corridor seemed less shining, drabber than before. And so unfortunately active was his imagination, so quick to riot, that almost he could fancy for one dreadful instant as he looked at her that there was cabbage in her very hair.
"Ingeborg," he said the moment he was in the parlour, "I can't stand this. I can't endure this sort of thing, you know."
He rubbed both his hands through his hair and gnawed at a finger and fixed his eyes on hers in a kind of angry reproach.
"I was afraid you wouldn't like it," she said apologetically, feeling somehow as though the weather were her fault.
"Like it! And I can't idle here any more. You can't expect me to hang on here any more—"
"Oh, but I never expected—" she interrupted hastily, surprised and distressed that she should have produced any such impression.
"Well, it comes to the same thing, your making difficulties about coming away, your wanting such a lot of persuading."