I had a sort of chill.

"Good gracious!" I exclaimed, "should I have kissed it?"

They roared at that, and Miss Patty had to sit down in a chair.

"You see, she knows, Oskar," she said. "The rest are thinking and
perhaps guessing, but Minnie is the only one that knows, and she never
talks. Everybody who comes here tells Minnie his troubles."

"But--am I a trouble?" he asked in a low tone. I was down in the spring,
but I heard it.

"So far you have hardly been an unalloyed joy," she replied, and from
the spring I echoed "Amen."

"Yes--I'm so hung with family skeletons that I clatter when I walk," I
explained, pretending I hadn't heard, and brought them both glasses of
water. "It's got to be a habit with some people to save their sciatica
and their husband's dispositions and their torpid livers and their
unpaid bills and bring 'em here to me."

He sniffed at the glass and put it down.

"Herr Gott!" he said, "what a water! It is--the whole thing is
extraordinary! I can understand the reason for Carlsbad or Wiesbaden--it
is gay. One sees one's friends; it is--social. But here--!"

He got up and, lifting a window curtain, peered out into the snow.