“Have you enjoyed yourself, Miss Minora?’ inquired Irais, as we got out of the forest on to the chaussée, and the lights of the village before ours twinkled in the distance.
“How many degrees do you suppose there are now?” was Minora’s reply to this question.
“Degrees?—Of frost? Oh, dear me, are you cold,” cried Irais solicitously.
“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said Minora sulkily; and Irais pinched me. “Well, but think how much colder you would have been without all that fur you ate for lunch inside you,” she said.
“And what a nice chapter you will be able to write about the Baltic,” said I. “Why, it is practically certain that you are the first English person who has ever been to just this part of it.”
“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, “about being the first who ever burst—”
“ ‘Into that silent sea,’ ” finished Minora hastily. “You can’t quote that without its context, you know.”
“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly; “I only paused to breathe. I must breathe, or perhaps I might die.”
The lights from my energetic friend’s Schloss shone brightly down upon us as we passed round the base of the hill on which it stands; she is very proud of this hill, as well she may be, seeing that it is the only one in the whole district.
“Do you never go there?” asked Minora, jerking her head in the direction of the house.
“Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and I should feel I was in the way if I went often.”
“It would be interesting to see another North German interior,” said Minora; “and I should be obliged if you would take me.”
“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a strange girl,” I protested; “and we are not at all on such intimate terms as to justify my taking all my visitors to see her.”
“What do you want to see another interior for?” asked Irais. “I can tell you what it is like; and if you went nobody would speak to you, and if you were to ask questions, and began to take notes, the good lady would stare at you in the frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth had brought a young lunatic out for an airing. Everybody is not as patient as Elizabeth,” added Irais, anxious to pay off old scores.
“I would do a great deal for you, Miss Minora,” I said, “but I can’t do that.”
“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I would be placed with great ceremony on a sofa behind a large, polished oval table with a crochet-mat in the centre—it has got a crochet-mat in the centre, hasn’t it?” I nodded. “And you would sit on one of the four little podgy, buttony, tasselly red chairs that are ranged on the other side of the table facing the sofa. They are red, Elizabeth?” Again I nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, and there is no carpet except a rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark chocolate colour, almost black; that is in order that after years of use the dirt may not show, and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like wickedness, you see, Miss Minora—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows so much as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At intervals round the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on them, and in one corner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?” she asked, turning to me.
“No, it is white.”
“There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air and the sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains under heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just opposite, with peering eyes at every window trying to look in, instead of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. No fire, no sunlight, no books, no flowers; but a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up under the door, mixed, in due season, with soapsuds.”
“When did you go there?” asked Minora.
“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been calling there all my life.”
Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the depths of her head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark eyelashes, and far be it from me to deny that each eye taken by itself is fine, but they are put in all wrong.
“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be the significance of sofa corners in Germany. If we three went there together, I should be ushered into the right-hand corner of the sofa, because it is the place of honour, and I am the greatest stranger; Elizabeth would be invited to seat herself in the left-hand corner, as next in importance; the hostess would sit near us in an armchair; and you, as a person of no importance whatever, would either be left to sit where you could, or would be put on a chair facing us, and with the entire breadth of the table between us to mark the immense social gulf that separates the married woman from the mere virgin. These sofa corners make the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a way that nothing else could. The world might come to an end, and create less sensation in doing it, than you would, Miss Minora, if by any chance you got into the right-hand corner of one. That you are put on a chair on the other side of the table places you at once in the scale of precedence, and exactly defines
