Her mother, far away, was already becoming a rather sad and a quite tender memory. All those days and years on a sofa, and all the days and years still to come.... Now she knew better, now that she was married herself, what it must have been like to be married to the Bishop, to have twenty years of unadulterated Bishop. She no longer wondered at the sofa. She was full of understanding and pity.
"One does, no doubt, at the beginning," said Herr Dremmel.
"And then leaves off? Is that all children are born for, that they may leave off loving us?"
He became cautious. He talked of the general and the individual. Of many mothers and some mothers. Of the mothers of the present generation—he called them the Gewesene—and the mothers of the generation to be born—he called them the Werdende. And presently, as she sat rather enigmatically silent on his knee, he developed affection for his mother, explaining that no doubt it had always been there, but like many other good things when life was busy and a man had little time to go back and stir them had lain dormant, and he now thought, indeed he recognised, that it would be excellent to urge her to come over soon and spend an afternoon—or still better a morning.
"But you're not here in the morning," said Ingeborg.
"Ah—that is true. I am present, however, at dinner."
"But nobody ever knows when."
"I might, perhaps, arrive early."
In this way the elder Frau Dremmel, who had her pride to consider as the widow of her neglectful son's traditionally appreciative father, and who would consequently never have taken what she called in her broodings the first step, did, about seven weeks after the marriage, cross the threshold of her daughter-in-law's home.