"Then why didn't you insist?"
He hesitated, avoiding her eyes.
"I didn't want to bother you more than I could help. Sometimes I am afraid it must be very hard on you, little woman."
Intuitively she guessed his thoughts, and without a word she gathered up some sheets of closely written notepaper lying on the table and thrust them into his hands.
"There, read that, you extremely foolish husband of mine!" she cried triumphantly. "I have been writing home, so you can judge for yourself."
He obeyed, and she stood watching him, knowing that he could but be satisfied. Indeed, her letters home were full of her happiness and of Wolff—the two things were synonymous—and if she did not mention that their home was small and stuffy, that she did most of the household work herself, and that a strict, painful economy watched over every item of their daily life, it was partly because she told herself that these details played no part in her estimation and partly because she shrank instinctively from the criticism which she knew would inevitably result. She gave, instead, glowing descriptions of the dinner-parties, of the whist-parties, even of the four-hour tea-parties with their unbroken conversational circle of Dienstangelegenheiten and "Dienst-mädchen." And in all this there was no hypocrisy. Her momentary depression and distaste were sub-conscious; she did not recognise them as such. She called them "moods," which vanished like mists in the sunshine of her husband's presence.
"Well?" she demanded, as he put the letters aside.
He shook his finger at her.
"Frauchen, Frauchen!" he said, laughing, "I am afraid you are what English people would call a humbug. From this epistle one would really imagine that Frau von Seleneck had received you in a palace, and that you had associated with all the belles esprits in Berlin, instead of—well, I imagine something very different. If I remember rightly, on that particular evening I found a very pale-faced wife waiting for me, with a bad headache and an apologetic description of an afternoon spent in an overheated cupboard, with six other unhappy sufferers. And then you sit down and write that you enjoyed yourself immensely. Oh, Nora, Nora!"
"I did enjoy myself!" Nora affirmed, perching herself on the arm of her chair. "You know very well that the anticipation of happiness is almost as good as the thing itself, and every time that I felt I was going to suffocate I thought of the evening we were to spend together afterwards, and felt as happy as I have described myself. After all, everything helps to pass the time till we are together again."