calmed her fears by assuring her that, while the men were interesting and ugly with the fascinating ugliness of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and uninteresting and wore hopeless hats. I have written Norah and Max reams about this household, from the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and serves my meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related to Frau Knapf, whom I have never seen. Minna is inordinately fond of dress, and her remarks anent my own garments are apt to be a trifle disconcerting, especially when she intersperses her recital of dinner dishes with admiring adjectives directed at my blouse or hat. Thus:
“Wir haben roast beef, und spareribs mit Sauerkraut, und schicken—ach, wie schon, Frau Orme! Aber ganz prachtvoll!” Her eyes and hands are raised toward heaven.
“What’s prachtful? ” I ask, startled. “The chicken?”
“Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?”
I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the aborigines. It used to fuss me to death to meet one of them in the halls. They always stopped short, brought heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist, and thundered: “Nabben’, Fraulein!”
I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly, and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply, “Nabben’,” and wish that Norah could but see me in the act.
When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed a little and shrugged his shoulders and said:
“Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and so unmarried. In Germany a married woman brushes her hair quite smoothly back, and pins it in a hard knob. And she knows nothing of such bewildering collars and fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do you call them—jabots?”
Von Gerhard has not behaved at all nicely. I did not see him until two weeks after my arrival in Milwaukee, although he telephoned twice to ask if there was anything that he could do to make me comfortable.
“Yes,” I had answered the last time that I heard his voice over the telephone. “It would be a whole heap of comfort to me just to see you. You are the nearest thing to Norah that there is in this whole German town, and goodness knows you’re far from Irish.”
He came. The weather had turned suddenly cold and he was wearing a fur-lined coat with a collar of fur. He looked most amazingly handsome and blond and splendidly healthy. The clasp of his hands was just as big and sure as ever.
“You have no idea how glad I am to see you,” I told him. “If you had, you would have been here days ago. Aren’t you rather ill-mannered and neglectful, considering that you are responsible for my being here?”
“I did not know whether you, a married woman, would care to have me here,” he said, in his composed way. “In a place like this people are not always kind enough to take the trouble to understand. And I would not have them raise their eyebrows at you, not for—”
“Married!” I laughed, some imp of willfulness seizing me, “I’m not married. What mockery to say that I am married simply because I must write madam before my name! I am not married, and I shall talk to whom I please.”
And then Von Gerhard did a surprising thing. He took two great steps over to my chair, and grasped my hands and pulled me to my feet. I stared up at him like a silly creature. His face was suffused with a dull red, and his eyes were unbelievably blue and bright. He had my hands in his great grip, but his voice was very quiet and contained.
“You are married,” he said. “Never forget that for a moment. You are bound, hard and fast and tight. And you are for no man. You are married as much as though that poor creature in the mad house were here working for you, instead of the case being reversed as it is. So.”
“What do you mean!” I cried, wrenching myself away indignantly. “What right have you to talk to me like this? You know what my life has been, and how I have tried to smile with my lips and stay young in my heart! I thought you understood. Norah thought so too, and Max—”
“I do understand. I understand so well that I would not have you talk as you did a moment ago. And I said what I said not so much for your sake, as for mine. For see, I too must remember that you write madam before your name. And sometimes it is hard for me to remember.”
“Oh,” I said, like a simpleton, and stood staring after him as he quietly gathered up his hat and gloves and left me standing there.
CHAPTER VII
BLACKIE’S PHILOSOPHY
I did not write Norah about Von Gerhard. After all, I told myself, there was nothing to write. And so I was the first to break the solemn pact that we had made.
“You will write everything, won’t you, Dawn dear?” Norah had pleaded, with tears, in her pretty eyes. “Promise me. We’ve been nearer to each other in these last few months than we have been since we were girls. And I’ve loved it so. Please don’t do as you did during those miserable years in New York, when you were fighting your troubles alone and we knew nothing of it. You wrote only the happy things. Promise me you’ll write the unhappy ones too—though the saints forbid that there should be any to write! And Dawn, don’t you dare to forget your heavy underwear in November. Those lake breezes!—Well, some one has to tell you, and I can’t leave those to Von Gerhard. He has promised to act as monitor over your health.”
And so I promised. I crammed my letters with descriptions of the Knapf household. I assured her that I was putting on so much weight that the skirts which formerly hung about me in limp, dejected folds now refused to meet in the back, and all the hooks and eyes were making faces at each other. My cheeks, I told her, looked as if I were wearing plumpers, and I was beginning to waddle and puff as I walked.
Norah made frantic answer:
“For mercy’s sake child, be careful or you’ll be FAT!”
To which I replied: “Don’t care if I am. Rather be hunky and healthy than skinny and sick. Have tried both.”
It is impossible to avoid becoming round-cheeked when one is working on a paper that allows one to shut one’s desk and amble comfortably home for dinner at least five days in the week. Everybody is at least plump in this comfortable, gemutlich town, where everybody placidly locks his shop or office and goes home at noon to dine
