His eyes rolled in his head as he looked at her. Terror distorted the wrinkled roundness of his enormous old head, with the monk's-face, clean-shaven, and the sunken mouth, which was now open, while slaver flowed between the crumbly teeth over the frightened lips. He clenched and raised his old hands, with the skin hanging in loose, untidy folds, and then dropped them on his knee.
He knew: Ina saw that at once. And she acted as though his scream was no more than an exclamation following upon a failure to hear, because of his deafness; she raised her voice politely and quietly and repeated in a little louder tone, articulating her words very clearly:
"Is it true that, sixty years ago, Grandmamma—though she was thirty-seven then—was still a gloriously beautiful woman? Yes, those old people took more care of themselves than we do. I'm forty-five, but I'm an old woman...."
"Come, come," said Aunt Floor, "an oldd womann!"
And the doctor mumbled:
"Yes-yes, aha, oh, is that what you were asking, Ina?... Yes, yes, certainly: Grandmamma ... Grandmamma was a splendid, a splendid woman ... even after she was past her first youth...."
"And what about Ottilie? She was for-r-rty when Steyn fell in love with her."
"Yes," said Ina. "It wasn't ... quite nice of Aunt Ottilie; but it was a wonderful testimony to her youth...."
And she stared at the doctor with the hidden glance of her well-bred, wearily-blinking eyes. He sat huddled in his chair, an old, decayed, shapeless mass, a heaped-up ruin of a man and a human being, an old, old monk, but wearing a loose frockcoat and loose waistcoat, which draped his broad body. The terror in his rolling eyes had died away; and his glance drooped to the left, his head to the right. It was as though he were seized with inertia, after his fright, after his excessive emotion at Ina's question, at the ominous number of sixty. He nodded his enormous head sagaciously; and, in the wintry light from outside, the shiny top of his head became covered with bright patches.
"Yes-yes-yes, well-well-well!" he mumbled, almost like an idiot.