A pause. They all looked at me, shaking their heads, their mouths full of cherry stones.
“No wonder there is a repetition in England of that dreadful state of things in Paris,” said the Widow, folding her dinner napkin. “How can a woman expect to keep her husband if she does not know his favourite food after three years?”
“Mahlzeit!”
“Mahlzeit!”
I closed the door after me.
THE BARON
“Who is he?” I said. “And why does he sit always alone, with his back to us, too?”
“Ah!” whispered the Frau Oberregierungsrat, “he is a Baron.”
She looked at me very solemnly, and yet with the slightest possible contempt—a “fancy-not-recognising-that-at-the-first-glance” expression.
“But, poor soul, he cannot help it,” I said. “Surely that unfortunate fact ought not to debar him from the pleasures of intellectual intercourse.”