, with ears perpetually pricked up in the hope of
catching gossip, felt that she had not enjoyed an afternoon so much for
years.

Bibi sat listening with her mouth wide open. It was an artless way of
hers when she was much interested in a conversation, and was deplored by
those who wished her well.

"Oh, yes, she is quite in her senses. Rather too sure she knows best,
always, but quite in her senses."

"Then she is very religious?"

"Not in the ordinary way, I should think. She goes in for nature. _Gott
in der Natur_, and that sort of thing. If the sun shines more than usual
she goes and stands in it, and turns up her eyes and gushes. There's a
crocus in the garden, and when we came to it yesterday she stopped in
front of it and rhapsodised for ten minutes about things that have
nothing to do with crocuses--chiefly about the _lieben Gott_. And all in
English, of course, and it sounds worse in English."

"But then, my dear, she _is_ religious?"

"Oh, well, the pastor would not call it religion. It's a sort of
huddle-muddle pantheism as far as it is anything at all." From which it
will be seen that Trudi was even more frank about her friends behind
their backs than she was to their faces.

She drove back to Lohm in a discontented frame of mind. "What's the good
of anything?" was the mood she was in. She had over-tired herself
helping Anna, and she was afraid that being so much in cold rooms and
passages, and washing in hard water, had made her skin coarse. She had
caught sight of herself in a glass as she was leaving the
Regierungspraesidentin, and had been disconcerted by finding that she did
not look as pretty as she felt. Nor was she consoled for this by the
consciousness that she had been unusually amusing at Anna's expense; for
she was only too certain that the Regierungspraesidentin, when repeating
all she had told her to her friends, would add that Trudi Hasdorf had
terribly _eingepackt_--dreadful word, descriptive of the faded state
immediately preceding wrinkles, and held in just abhorrence by every
self-respecting woman. Of what earthly use was it to be cleverer and
more amusing than other people if at the same time you had _eingepackt_?

"What a stupid world it is," thought Trudi, driving along the _chaussee_
in the early April twilight. A mist lay over the sea, and the pale
sickle of the young moon rose ghost-like above the white shroud. Inland
the stars were faintly shining, and all the earth beneath