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Updated: June 24, 2025
She did not suffer contradiction. In the course of the evening she asked Christophe to play the piano. She thought it charming. But at bottom she admired her husband's playing just as much, for she thought him as superior all round as she was herself. Christophe had the pleasure of meeting Minna's mother once more, Frau von Kerich.
They made him even more uncomfortable by trying to put him at his ease Frau von Kerich, by her flow of words, Minna by the coquettish eyes which instinctively she made at him to amuse herself. Finally they gave up trying to get anything more from him than bows and monosyllables, and Frau von Kerich, who had the whole burden of the conversation, asked him, when she was worn out, to play the piano.
Minna would raise her eyes, lightly shrug her shoulders, and make a face. Frau von Kerich would smile down at the big boy groveling at her feet, and pat his head with her free hand, and say to him in her pretty voice, affectionately and ironically: "Well, well, old fellow! What is it?"
Frau von Kerich told Jean-Christophe not to listen to silly Minna; she begged him to come as often as he liked to her garden, since he loved it, and she added that he need never bother to call on them if he found it tiresome. "You need never bother to come and see us," added Minna. "Only if you do not come, beware!" She wagged her finger in menace.
Frau von Kerich tried to stop her, but she, too, could not help laughing, and Jean-Christophe, in spite of his constraint, fell victim to the contagiousness of it. Their merriment was irresistible; it was impossible to take offense at it. But Jean-Christophe lost countenance altogether when Minna caught her breath again, and asked him whatever he could be doing on the wall.
But Jean-Christophe thought that all the tenderness was given to him personally, and he was filled with gratitude; he would break out into little awkward, passionate speeches, which seemed a little ridiculous to Frau von Kerich, though they did not fail to give her pleasure. With Minna his relation was very different.
Frau von Kerich went on talking to him in her caressing voice, but it was the end; he heard no more the music of the words; he perceived under every word the falseness of that elegant soul. He could not answer a word. He went. Everything about him was going round and round.
"They do not know me again," he thought, comforted. Frau von Kerich presented her daughter, who had closed her book and was looking interestedly at Jean-Christophe. "My daughter Minna," she said, "She wanted so much to see you." "But, mamma," said Minna, "it is not the first time that we have seen each other." And she laughed aloud. "They do know me again," thought Jean-Christophe, crestfallen.
Sometimes Frau von Kerich herself would take the book; then she would lend to tragic histories the spiritual and tender graciousness of her own nature, but most often she would listen, lying back in her chair, her never-ending needlework in her lap; she would smile at her own thoughts, for always she would come back to them through every book.
Thereafter, under this arrangement, he went regularly twice a week in the morning, and very often he went again in the evening to play and talk. Frau von Kerich was glad to see him. She was a clever and a kind woman. She was thirty-five when she lost her husband, and although young in body and at heart, she was not sorry to withdraw from the world in which she had gone far since her marriage.
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