"Immense, my dear woman, what on earth are you talking of? Why Captain von Schallenfels of my regiment had always seventy or eighty ells of ribbons on his queue. Fact, I assure you," added the indignant old gentleman. "It trailed so on the ground that he was forced to tuck it into his coat pocket when on parade. True, my dear woman, true, I assure you."
The old Major, however, was kindness itself, though he went his way just the same as if his house was still empty. And this way was to have his meals to himself and, at four o'clock each day, to depart to the house of one Monsieur von Schrotter, and, with six other Memel gentlemen, drink beer, smoke, and discuss the army, Prussia, or Napoleon, until bedtime.
His wife, Bettina learned, had died many years before and he had but one son.
"Our cousin, Rudolph," Carl told her. "He is with my brother Wolf in the army."
In the evening all the family gathered in the sitting-room and there Bettina saw everybody.
First, there was the Professor, tall, kind-looking and very fond of his wife and children. He still wore his hair in a pig-tail and not brushed forward like the King, and he liked silver buckles on his shoes, and a stock, but not high like that of his brother.
"And our father knows, oh, everything," the twins told Bettina, "so much that our Queen used to send for him in Berlin to talk to her. He has read, oh, all the books in the world."
Madame von Stork was as kind-looking as her husband, but she was stout, and her skin was pink and white like a girl's, and she wore her hair very high, and on top of its rolls one of the huge turbans then the fashion. Sometimes she seemed quite like a large hen, clucking about her children, her feathers ruffling if a thing went wrong with any one of them.
Especially was she troubled about her pretty daughter Marianne.
"And no wonder," Bettina heard her telling the Major's housekeeper, Frau Winkel. "She is a girl, and yet is the one most like her dear father. She must always be at her books, and I cannot make her care for her embroidery, her tent stitch, nor the cooking. And what good is a German girl who cares for none of these things? Who will marry her, my dear Frau Winkel? She is fourteen, and most girls are married at fifteen or sixteen. Pauline, now, is entirely different. When there are clothes to be mended, her fingers assist me. When the children are noisy, she can quiet even Carl. It is she who makes the puddings, and if she has a spare moment she is busy over her embroidery; a true house-wife by nature, and French, too," added Madame von Stork, as if the two things were impossible. Perhaps it was Pauline's troubles which had subdued her. Before the flight from Berlin, Marianne had known nothing but joy and petting, but Pauline had a history as sad as Bettina.