“It is very easy to see. And next? Did you throw the picture at them?”
“No, but I was rather insulting and left the house. I wanted to go home, but—”
“But you’d have found no mummy there to comfort the silly baby or scold it. I must say, Harry, you make me almost sorry for you. I never knew such a baby.”
So it seemed to me, I must own. She gave me a glass of wine to drink. In fact, she was like a mother to me. In a glimpse, though, now and then I saw how young and beautiful she was.
“And so,” she began again, “Goethe has been dead a hundred years, and you’re very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head of what he must have looked like, and you have the right to, I suppose. But the artist who adores Goethe too, and makes a picture of him, has no right to do it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else—because you don’t like it. You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting and leave the house. If you had sense, you would laugh at the artist and the professor—laugh and be done with it. If you were out of your senses, you’d smash the picture in their faces. But as you’re only a little baby, you run home and want to hang yourself. I’ve understood your story very well, Harry. It’s a funny story. You make me laugh. But don’t drink so fast. Burgundy should be sipped. Otherwise you’ll get hot. But you have to be told everything—like a little child.”
She admonished me with the look of a severe governess of sixty.
“Oh, I know,” I said contentedly. “Only tell me everything.”
“What shall I tell you?”