covered that objects
which cannot be removed or climbed over can be walked round. A little
deviousness, and the thing was done. She herself had in the most
masterly manner when she was four escaped church-going for several years
by a simple method, that seemed to her looking back very like an
inspiration, of getting round it. She had never objected to going, had
never put into words the powerful if vague dislike with which it filled
her when Sunday after Sunday she had to go and dangle her legs
helplessly for two hours from the chair she was put on in the enclosed
pew reserved for the _hohe graefliche Herrschaften_ from the Slosh.

Her father, a strict observer of the correct and a pious believer in
God for other people, attended Divine Service as regularly as he wound
the clocks and paid the accounts. He _repraesentierte_, as the German
phrase went; and his wife and children were expected to _repraesentieren_
too. Which they did uncomplainingly; for when one has to do with
determined husbands and fathers it is quickest not to complain. But the
pins and needles that patient child endured, Anna-Felicitas remembered,
looking back through the years at the bunched-up figure on the chair as
at a stranger, were something awful. The edge of the chair just caught
her legs in the pins and needles place. If she had been a little bigger
or a little smaller it wouldn't have happened; as it was, St. Paul
wrestling with beasts at Ephesus wasn't more heroic than Anna-Felicitas
perceived that distant child to have been, silently Sunday after Sunday
bearing her legs. Then one Sunday something snapped inside her, and she
heard her own voice floating out into the void above the heads of the
mumbling worshippers, and it said with a terrible distinctness in a sort
of monotonous wail: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a
second time, in the breathless suspension of mumbling that followed upon
this: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a third time she
opened her mouth to repeat the outrageous statement, regardless of her
mother's startled hand laid on her arm, and of Anna-Rose's petrified
stare, and of the lifted faces of the congregation, and of the bent,
scandalized brows of the pastor,--impelled by something that possessed
her, unable to do anything but obey it; but her father, a man of deeds,
rose up in his place, took her in his arms, and carried her down the
stairs and out of the church. And the minute she found he