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"Oh nonsense!" cried the Fürstin, and wouldn't speak to me again until we got to that entirely Teutonic "art" station that is not the least among the sights of Worms. "Sores, indeed!" said the Fürstin presently, as we walked up the end of the platform. "There's nothing," said the Fürstin, with an unusual note of petulance, "she'd like better." "I can't think what men are coming to," she went on.
I met Rachel again in Germany through the devices of my cousin the Fürstin Letzlingen. I had finished seeing what I wanted to see in Westphalia and I was preparing to go to the United States. There I thought I should be able to complete and round off that large view of the human process I had been developing in my mind.
We looked up at it for a time and then went on with the talk to which we had been coming slowly since the Fürstin had packed us off for it, while she went into the town with Berwick to buy toys for her gatekeeper's children. I had talked about myself, and the gradual replacement of my ambition to play a part in imperial politics by wider intentions.
She halted, hesitated for a moment on the question and asked abruptly: "When are you coming back to England, Mr. Stratton?" "Certainly not for six months," I said. A movement of her eyes made me aware of the Fürstin and Berwick emerging from the trees. "And then?" asked Rachel. I didn't want to answer that question, in which the personal note sounded so clearly.
"This makes two," said the Fürstin, and held up a brace of fingers, "with scarcely a year and a half between them. Not much more anyhow.... It was natural, I suppose. A natural female indecency. I don't blame her. When a woman gives in she ought to do it thoroughly. But I don't see that it leaves you much scope for philandering, Stephen, does it?... And there you are, and here is Rachel.
"That girl," said the Fürstin, "that clean girl would have sooner died ten thousand deaths.... And she's never never been anything to you." I think that for an instant she had been frightened at her own words. She was now quite angry and short of breath. She had contrived a rapid indignation against Mary and myself. "I didn't know Mary had had any child at all," I said.
Rachel hesitated, looked back to measure the distance of the Fürstin and her companion and put her question again, but this time with a significance that did not seem even to want to hide itself. "Then will you come back?" she said. Her face flamed scarlet, but her eyes met mine boldly. Between us there was a flash of complete understanding.
It was clear to me that after that I must as people say "have things out" with Rachel. But before I could do anything of the sort the Fürstin pounced upon me. She made me sit up that night after her other guests had gone to their rooms, in the cosy little turret apartment she called her study and devoted to the reading of whatever was most notorious in contemporary British fiction.
She had overlooked something in her effort to seem entirely self-possessed. She collapsed. "My dear!" she cried, "I forgot!" "Oh! I'm only a German by marriage!" cried the Fürstin. "And I can assure you I quite understand about the triumph of it...." She surveyed the achievement of her countrymen. "It is ungracious.
And why don't you make a clean job of your life?..." "I didn't understand." "I wonder what you imagined." I reflected. "I wonder what I did. I suppose I thought of Mary just as I had left her always." I remained with my mind filled with confused images of Mary, memories, astonishment.... I perceived the Fürstin was talking.
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