United States or Botswana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In Gersau it was generally believed, however, that the gardener and his wife, in spite of their pretensions, used the cook's name as a screen to net the little profits of this bargain. The Bergmanns had made beautiful gardens round their house, and had built a hothouse.
The whole of the table on her right confessed to one Kuchen with their chocolate. In each case she smiled gravely and required the cake to be described. The meaning of the pilgrimage of enquiry came to Miriam when Fraulein reached Gertrude and beamed affectionately in response to her careless "Schokolade und ein Biskuit." Miriam and the Bergmanns were alone in their excesses.
It would never do for her to go into a German home. She must not say anything about the chance of going to the Bergmanns' even to Eve. She imagined Eve sitting listening in the window space in the bow that was carpeted with linoleum to look like parquet flooring.
Sitting at a little marble-topped table with the Bergmanns near the window and overlooking the full flood of the Georgstrasse Miriam felt a keen renewal of the sense of being abroad. Here she sat, in the little enclosure of this upper room above a shopful of strange Delikatessen, securely adrift. Behind her she felt, not home but the German school where she belonged. Here they all sat, free.
When he had taken leave of the Bergmanns it struck him that he was a simpleton, like any man of spirit and imagination disappointed of the results of a plan which he had believed would succeed. In the evening he, of course, went out in a boat on the lake, round and about the spit of land, to Brunnen and to Schwytz, and came in at nightfall.
The other visitors proved to be the Bergmanns in new dresses. Miriam gazed at Clara as she went down the schoolroom to her corner of the table. She looked like... a hostess. It seemed absurd to see her sit down to tea as a school-girl. The dress was a fine black muslin stamped all over with tiny fish-shaped patches of mauve.
Passing languidly up through the house after breakfast, unable to decide to spend her Saturday morning as usual at a piano in one of the bedrooms, Miriam went, wondering in response to a quiet call from Fraulein Pfaff into the large room shared by the Bergmanns and Ulrica Hesse.
Eve would, she was sure in her place.... Why not grimace and be very "bright" and "animated" until the end of the term and then go and stay with the Bergmanns for two months and be as charming as she could?... Her heart sank.... She imagined a house, everyone kind and blond and smiling. Emma's big tall brother smiling and joking and liking her.
"She has no taint of hypocrisy, and is carried away by impulse," thought he, "and I want her to be like a Parisian woman." Next day and the following days, in fact, for twenty days after, Rodolphe spent all his time at the Bergmanns', watching Francesca without having determined to watch her. In some souls admiration is not independent of a certain penetration.
She felt at ease sitting amongst them and was glad she was there and not at the English end of the table. Down here, hemmed in by the Bergmanns with Emma's little form, her sounds, movements and warmth, her little quiet friendliness planted between herself and the English, with the apparently unobservant Minna and Elsa across the way she felt safe.
Word Of The Day