All the books she possessed she had brought with her and spread over the living-room: the wedding-presents which had enriched her with Hardy and Meredith and Kipling and Tennyson and Ruskin, and her own books she had had as a girl. These were three, the Christian Year, given to her on her confirmation by her father, Longfellow's Poems, given her on her eighteenth birthday by her mother, and Dumas' Tulipe Noire, given her as a prize for French because Judith did not know any, one summer when a French governess was introduced (thoughtlessly, the Bishop said afterwards) into the Palace. This lady had been removed from the Palace again a little later with care, every corner of her room being scrupulously disinfected by the searching of Richards who found, however, nothing except one book in a yellow paper cover called Bibi et Lulu: Mœurs du Montparnasse; and even this was not in her room at all, but in Judith's, beneath some stockings.
Herr Dremmel took up one of the wedding volumes when first he saw them in the sitting-room and turned its pages. It was The Shaving of Shagpat. "Tut, tut," he said presently, putting it down.
"Why, Robert?" asked Ingeborg, eager to hear what he thought. But he patted her abstractedly, already slid off again down into regions of reality, the regions in which his brain incessantly worked out possible chemical combinations and forgot with a completeness that sometimes even surprised himself that he had a wife. Invariably, however, he found it pleasant on re-emerging to remember her.
She asked to be shown his experimental fields, and he took her with him very amiably one hot morning, promising to explain them to her; but instantly on reaching them he became absorbed, and after she had spent an hour sitting on a stone at the edge of a strip of lupins beneath a haggard little fir tree which gave the solitary bit of shade in that burning desert watching him going up and down the different strips examining apparently every single plant with Johann, she began to think she had better go home and look after the dinner, and waving a good-bye to him, which he did not see, she went.
A day or two later she asked whether it would not be good and pleasant that his mother should come over to tea with them soon.
He replied amiably that it would be neither good nor pleasant.
She asked whether it might not be a duty of theirs to invite her.
He replied, after consideration, "Perhaps."
She asked whether he did not love his mother.
He replied unhesitatingly, "No."