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She could have screamed at this thoughtfulness which knew and yet should not have known; her mother understood this also, and for that reason they had gone traveling. The whole purpose of the journey was only that she might forget. Mrs. Fonss did not need to make her daughter feel uneasy by scrutinizing her face in order to know where her thoughts were.
Mrs. Fonss viewed this lifeless monotony with a resigned smile, but it made Elinor visibly nervous; not actively nervous as in the case of annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days of rain, when all one's gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with the rain; or as at the idiotically consoling tick-tack of a clock, when one sits and grows incurably tired of one's self; or at watching the flowers of the wall-paper, when the same chain of worn-out dreams clanks about against one's will in the brain and the links are joined and come apart and in a stifling endlessness are united again.
A little later she went upstairs to Elinor. Elinor slept. Mrs. Fonss sat down by her bed and looked at her pale child whose features she could only dimly distinguish under the faint yellow glow of the night lamp. For Elinor's sake they would have to wait. In a few days they would separate from Thorbrogger, go to Nice, and stay there by themselves.
One October afternoon two Danish ladies were seated on this bench, Mrs. Fonss, a widow, and her daughter Elinor. Although they had been here several days and were already familiar with the view before them, they nevertheless sat there and marveled that this was the way the Provence looked. And this really was the Provence!
Tage ran up the stairs to see if there might not be people somewhere in the house, and Mrs. Fonss in the meantime walked up and down the arcade. As she was on the turn toward the gate a tall man with a bearded, tanned face, appeared at the end of the passage directly in front of her. He had a guide-book in his hand; he listened for something, and then looked forward, straight at her.
"That surely is Tage coming," said Mrs. Fonss to her daughter when she heard laughter and some Danish exclamations on the other side of the thick hedge of hornbeam. Elinor pulled herself together. And it was Tage, Tage and Kastager, a wholesale merchant from Copenhagen, with his sister and daughter; Mrs. Kastager lay ill at home in the hotel. Mrs.
Fonss, "is it possible that you and I are old acquaintances?" "Are you Emil Thorbrogger?" exclaimed Mrs. Fonss, and held out her hand. He seized it. "Yes, I am he," he said gayly, "and you are she?" His eyes almost filled with tears as he looked at her. Mrs Fonss introduced Tage as her son.
The Englishman of yesterday immediately came to her mind. "Pardon me?" he began interrogatively, and bowed. "I am a stranger," Mrs. Fonss replied, "nobody seems to be at home, but my son has just run upstairs to see whether...." These words were exchanged in French. At this moment Tage arrived. "I have been everywhere," he said, "even in the living quarters, but didn't find as much as a cat."
Fonss could not bear the thought that Tage's father-in-law should be mentioned with a twinkle in the eye and a smile round the mouth, and for that reason she exhibited a certain coldness toward the family to the great sorrow of the enamored Tage. On the morning of the following day Tage and his mother had gone to look at the little museum of the town.
"Step-father," cried Tage, "I hope that he does not for one moment dare.... You are mad. Where he enters, we go out. There isn't any power on earth that can force me into the slightest intimacy with that person. Mother must choose he or we! If they go to Denmark after their marriage, then we are exiles; if they stay here, we leave." "And those are your intentions, Tage?" asked Mrs. Fonss.
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