"But I heard," said Frau Dremmel. "Through your housekeeper. And others. Thus I heard. Of my only son's marriage. I a widow."
Ingeborg, not understanding, stood smiling nervously. She thought on such an occasion somebody ought to smile, but she did not like doing it. The immobility of Frau Dremmel, who moved nothing but her eyes, the dank bare passage, the rush of cold smell that had escaped out of the one door in it, the bleak air of poverty about her mother-in-law—poverty in some strange way regarding itself as virtuous for no reason except that it was poor—did not make her smiling easy. But she was a bride; just coming home; just being introduced to her husband's people. Somebody, she felt, on such an occasion must smile, and, trained as she had been by her father to do the things no one else wanted to do, she provided all the smiling for the home-coming entirely herself.
"Please, Robert, tell your mother how sorry I am I can't talk," she said. "Do tell her I wish I weren't so dumb."
"How much has she?" Frau Dremmel was asking across this speech.
"Enough, enough," said her son, putting on his hat and making movements of departure.
"Ah. I am not to know. More secrets. It is all to go in further unchristian tampering with God's harvests."
Herr Dremmel bestowed a second abstracted kiss somewhere on his mother's head. He had not listened to anything she said for a quarter of a century.
"Nothing for the mother," she went on. "No, no. The mother is only a widow. She is of no account. Yet your sainted father—"
"Farewell, and God be with you," said Herr Dremmel, departing down the passage and forgetting in his hurry to get his bride home as quickly as possible to take her with him.
For a moment she was left alone confronting her new relation. She made a great plunge into filialness and, swiftly blushing, picked up her mother-in-law's passive hand.