When they had finished they began to talk of pictures and of the lives of the painters, and he told her stories of Michael Angelo and Rembrandt: how Michael Angelo never took his boots off, and was never in love in his life; and how Rembrandt was practically starved to death. Then he showed her reproductions of Cranach and Dürer, whom at the time he adored, and they bent over them, the chestnut head and the curly black together. Gradually she led him on to tell of his own life, and he began at the beginning in Austria, holding her spell-bound with his vivid, picturesque talk.
“It makes me feel very quiet and dull,” she said. “I don’t think I ever regarded places outside England as real, somehow. There was just home and London, and London seemed to be the end of everything. All the trains stop there, you know.”
“Where is your home?” he asked.
“In Sussex. It is very beautiful country.”
“How did you come to the Detmold?”
“A girl at home had been there, and at school they said I was no good at anything but drawing. Indeed, I was sent away from two schools, and at home I was such a trouble that mother decided I must do something to earn my living. So I was sent up to the Detmold. I had my hair down my back then.”
“I remember,” said he. “In a plait.”
She smiled with pleasure at that.
“Yes,” she said. “In a plait. I lived in a hostel, where they bullied me because I was so untidy and was always being late for meals. At home, you know, there were only my brothers, and my mother could never keep them in order, and I was always treated as if I was a boy too. . . . And I think that’s all.”
She ended so lamely that his irritation got the better of him, and he jumped to his feet. It seemed to him that his view of the “top-knots” was confirmed. They were simply negligible. He was baffled, and stood staring down at her. Was she no more interested in herself than that? Comparing the smooth monotony of her life with his, he waxed impatient, and told himself he was a fool to have invited her to come to him.