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"Well, I could have looked at him," said the Grafin. "There'll be thousands of other boys to look at presently," said Cicely, laughing at the old woman's frankness. "Do you think there will be thousands?" asked the Grafin, with an anxious lowering of the voice; "really, thousands? Hundreds, perhaps; there is some uncertainty. Every one is not sanguine." "Hundreds, anyway," said Cicely.
"No," I snapped. "I don't." And I drummed with my fingers on the windowpane and felt as rebellious as six years old. But of course I'm going to be good. I won't do anything that may delay my getting home to you. The Bornsteds say Koseritz is a very beautiful place, on the very edge of the Haff. They talk with deep respectfulness of the Herr Graf, and the Frau Grafin, and the junge Komtesse.
The room is just like an English country-house bedroom; in fact the Grafin told me she got all her chintzes in London! It's so funny after my room at Frau Berg's, and my little unpainted wooden attic at the Oberforsterei. Good night, my blessed mother. There are two owls somewhere calling to each other in the forest. Not another sound. Such utter peace. Your Chris.
But he did come in. He came just as I was going downstairs carrying my violin-case how foolish and outside of life that music business seems now and he seized my hand and took me into the drawingroom. "Not in here, not in here!" cried the Grafin, getting up excitedly. "Not again, not ever again does an Englishwoman come into my drawingroom "
I listened, trying to understand, trying to give all my attention to it and disentangle it, while my heart was thumping so because of Bernd. For I was being turned out in disgrace, and I am his betrothed, and so I am his honour, and whatever of shame there is for me there is of shame for him. The Grafin got more and more unsteady in her voice as she went on.
We had tea as usual on the terrace in the shady angle of the south-west walls, and the Grafin discoursed placidly on the political situation. She was most instructive; calmly imparting knowledge to Helena and me; calmly embroidering a little calm-looking shirt for her married daughter's baby, with calm, cool white fingers. She seemed very content with the world, and the way it is behaving.
You used to exhort me to put them on with care and concentration, and then leave them to God. Such sound advice! And I've followed it so long that I do completely forget them; but last Monday I didn't. They were urged on my notice by Grafin Koseritz's daughter, whose eyes ran over me from head to foot and then back again when I came in.
How excellent it would be, then, if he stayed away and played indefinitely. I wanted to say this to the Grafin when she read the papers aloud to us at lunch, and I wonder what would have happened to me if I had. Well, though I've got to stay with her and be polite in the Sommerstrasse, I shall escape every other day to that happy, rude place, Kloster's flat, and can say what I like.
The Grafin, when I ask her what she thinks, says soothingly that I needn't worry my little head my little head! As though I were six, and made of sugar and that everything will settle down again. "Europe is in an excited state," she says placidly, "and suspects danger round every corner, and when it has reached the corner and looked round it, it finds nothing there after all.
Herr von Kwarl, with all his useful qualities of brain and temperament, might conceivably fall out of favour in some unexpected turn of the political wheel, and the Shalems would probably have their little day and then a long afternoon of diminishing social importance; the placid dormouse-like Grafin would outlast them all.
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