Ingram leaned forward, his face flushed, laughter and triumph in his eyes, and caught hold of her right hand in its inky glove.
"Adorable inkstains," he said, looking at them and then looking up at her. "You little burner of ships."
And as she opened her mouth in what was evidently going to be a question he hurried her away from it with a string of his phrases.
"You are all the happiness," he said, with an energy of conviction astonishing at half-past nine in the morning, "and all the music, and all the colour, and all the fragrance there is in the world."
"Then you haven't noticed the cabbage?" she asked, immensely relieved.
He let go her hand. "What cabbage?" he asked shortly, for it nettled him to be interrupted when he was spinning images, and it more than nettled him to be interrupted in the middle of an emotion.
But when she began—vividly—to describe the inner condition of the Christliche Hospiz he stopped her.
"I don't want to talk of anything ugly to-day," he said. "Not to-day of all days in my life." And he added, leaning forward again and looking into her eyes, "Ingeborg, do you know what to-day is?"
"Thursday," said Ingeborg.
The conductor—it was a corridor train, and though they had the compartment to themselves the passage outside was busy with people squeezing past each other and begging each other's pardons—came in to look at their tickets.