“Well, dear lady! To what are we indebted for the honour of a visit from this personage from the royal city of—?”
“Oh, give me a kiss, Tom,” she said, sat up to offer him her cheek, and then sank back again. “Well, how are you, my dear boy? Quite unchanged, I see, since I saw you in Munich.”
“You can’t tell much about it with the blinds down, my dear. And you ought not to steal my thunder like that, either. It is more suitable for me to say—” he held her hand in his, and at the same time drew up a chair beside the bed—“as I so often have, that you and Tilda—”
“Oh, for shame, Tom!—How is Tilda?”
“Well, of course. Madame Krauseminz sees she doesn’t starve. Which doesn’t prevent her eating for the week ahead when she comes here on Thursday.”
She laughed very heartily—as she had not for a long time back, in fact. Then she broke off with a sigh, and asked “And how is business?”
“Oh, we get on. Mustn’t complain.”
“Thank goodness, here everything is as it should be. Oh, Tom, I don’t feel much like chatting pleasantly about trifles!”
“Pity. One should preserve one’s sense of humour, quand même.”
“All that is at an end, Tom.—You know all?”
“ ‘You know all’!” he repeated. He dropped her hand and pushed back his chair. “Goodness gracious, how that sounds! ‘All’! What-all lies in that ‘all’? ‘My love and grief I gave thee,’ eh? No, listen!”
She was silent. She swept him with an astonished and deeply offended glance.
“Yes, I expected that look,” he said, “for without that look you would not be here. But, dear Tony, let me take the thing as much too lightly as you take it too seriously. You will see we shall complement each other very nicely—”
“Too seriously, Thomas? I take it too seriously?”
“Yes.—For heaven’s sake, don’t let’s make a tragedy of it! Let us take it in a lower key, not with ‘all is at an end’ and ‘your unhappy Antonie.’ Don’t misunderstand me, Tony. You well know that no one can be gladder than I that you have come. I have long wished you would come to us on a visit by yourself, without your husband, so that we could be en famille together once more. But to come now, like this—my dear child, I beg your pardon, but it was—foolish. Yes—let me finish! Permaneder has certainly behaved very badly, as I will give him to understand pretty clearly—don’t be afraid of that—”
“As to how he has behaved himself, Thomas,” she interrupted him, raising herself up to lay a hand upon her breast, “as far as that goes, I have already given him to understand that—and not only ‘given him to understand,’ I can tell you! I am convinced that further discussion with that man is entirely out of place.” And she let herself fall back again and looked sternly and fixedly at the ceiling.
He bowed, as if under the weight of her words, and kept on looking down at his knee and smiling.
“Well, then, I won’t send him a stiff letter. It is just as you say. In the end it is after all your affair, and it is quite enough if you put him in his place—it is your duty as his wife. After all, there are some extenuating circumstances. There was a birthday celebration, and he came home a little bit exalted, so to speak, and was guilty of a false step, an unseemly blunder—”
“Thomas,” said she, “I do not understand you. I do not understand your tone. You—a man with your principles! But you did not see him. You did not see how drunk he looked—”
“He looked ridiculous enough, I’m sure. But that is it, Tony. You will not see how comic it was—but probably that is the fault of your bad digestion. You caught your husband in a moment of weakness, and you have seen him make himself look ridiculous. But that ought not to outrage you to such an extent. It ought to amuse you a little, perhaps, but bring you closer together as human beings. I will say that I don’t mean you could have just let it pass with a laugh and said nothing about it—not at all. You left home; that was a demonstration of a rather extreme kind, perhaps—a bit too severe—but, after all, he deserved it. I imagine he is feeling pretty down in the mouth. I only mean that you must get to take the thing differently—not so insulted—a little more politic point of view. We are just between ourselves. Let me tell you something, Tony. In any marriage, the important thing is, on which side the moral ascendency lies. Understand? Your husband has laid himself open, there is no doubt of that. He compromised himself and made a laughable spectacle—laughable, precisely because what he did was actually so harmless, so impossible to take seriously. But, after all, his dignity is impaired—and the moral advantage has passed over to you. If you know how to use it wisely, your happiness is assured. If you go back, say in a couple of weeks—certainly I must insist on keeping you for ourselves as long as that—if you go back to Munich in a couple of weeks, you will see—”
“I will not go back to Munich, Thomas.”
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, putting his hand to his ear and screwing up his face as he bent forward.
She was lying on her back with her head sunk in the pillow, so that her chin stood out with an effect of severity. “Never,” she said. And she gave
