"Well ..." said the Raven-mother.
"Yes, of course," said the stranger, "but how do you know that I spend more time, or spend it more pleasantly in scratching on copper than in sleeping or feeding--pardon, eating?"
"Well," said the Raven-mother, "it's customary to call a man according to his most respectable occupation."
"Respectable? I find it, for example, quite respectable to lie on one's stomach on a hot summer day in the field, in front of a mouse-hole and observe the daily occupations of the little gray mistress of the domain. That way one comes nearer to the soul of the world than by engraving what any fool has chosen to smear on canvas. Ah yes ... our respectable professions!"
"Well, but ..." said the Raven-mother, considerably disconcerted, looking around at the other faces. She saw a merry twinkle in the eyes of old Frau Kummerfelden. The Kirsten girls looked very roguish, because they had got launched on a good laugh and had not yet been able to give it free course. Their young comrades gazed with interest on the man who had emerged like a pike from the floods. The suitors looked extremely impatient. Beate's eyes were fastened longingly on the stranger, as if he were cutting the bread of life for her. To be sure, it seemed rather crusty and brittle--but there was something there that had a nourishing flavor.
The stranger's nose had a peculiar shape. It was a nose that seemed somehow rather lonely in the middle of the face with its prominences and depressions. Oh, quite a respectable nose, if one did not make too many claims for beauty on its behalf. It had, as it were, broken away from its companion features; but it seemed somehow to have great affinity and sympathy with the inner being of the stranger. There was something pugnacious about his manner of expressing himself, about his whole bearing and every gesture he made.
"May one ask," began little Madame Kummerfelden, in her charming flowered dress and from under her big cap, "where the gentleman has come from, and where he is purposing to go?"
"I was purposing to pay a visit to your town down there and see your old man."
"The Duke--"
"No."