That's because three years ago we had a little feller an' when he was a week old he took sick an' died.
MRS. HASSENREUTER
My husband has already … yes, my husband did tell me about that … how deeply you grieved over that little son of yours. You know how it is … you know how my good husband has his eyes and his heart open to everything. And if it's a question of people who are about him or who give him their services—then everything good or bad, yes, everything good or bad that happens to them, seems just as though it had happened to himself.
MRS. JOHN
I mind as if it was this day how he sat in the carridge that time with the little child's coffin on his knees. He wouldn't let the gravedigger so much as touch it.
JOHN
[Wiping the moisture out of his eyes.] That's the way it was. No. I couldn't let him do that.
MRS. HASSENREUTER
Just think, to-day at the dinner-table we had to drink wine—suddenly, to drink wine! Wine! For years and years the city-water in decanters has been our only table drink … absolutely the only one. Dear children, said my husband.—You know that he had just returned from an eleven or twelve day trip to Alsace. Let us drink, my husband said, the health of my good and faithful Mrs. John, because … he cried out in his beautiful voice … because she is a visible proof of the fact that the cry of a mother heart is not indifferent to our Lord.—And so we drank your health, clinking our glasses! Well, and here I'm bringing you at my husband's special … at his very special and particular order … an apparatus for the sterilisation of milk.—Walburga, you may unpack the boiler.
HASSENREUTER enters unceremoniously through the outer door which has stood ajar. He wears a top-hat, spring overcoat, carries a silver-headed cane, in a word, is gotten up in his somewhat shabby meek-day outfit. He speaks hastily and almost without pauses.