“She is much too good for you,” Frederick teased Peter.  “She ought to be the wife of a Duerer, or still better, the wife of the wealthy Ratsherr Willibald Pirkheimer of Nuremberg.  She was born to preside over a comfortable patrician household, with closets and chests full of linen and heavy silk and brocade garments.  She should go to sleep every night on a bed three yards high covered with silk spreads.  She should have twice as many hats and fur garments as the town council allows the wealthy.  Instead of that, poor soul, she studied medicine, and you let her run around to every Tom, Dick, and Harry with her little bag of ill omen.”

As a matter of fact, the ugliness of her surroundings and the strenuousness of her occupation, which opened up no vista of hope and usually robbed her of four nights’ sleep in a week, had made of Mrs. Schmidt an embittered person suffering from homesickness.  What aggravated matters was that she was dominated by an obstinate sense of duty and that dogged insistence on saving characteristic of the Swiss.  Since her parents’ letters strengthened her in her notions, she was not to be shaken in her resolve not to return home until after a certain sum had been laid aside, and of this there was no immediate prospect.  Whenever Peter, saddened to see his wife withering away from overwork and nostalgia, proposed that they return to Europe, she would become very hard, cutting and bitter.  But when she had a free hour in which to talk to Frederick and her husband of the Swiss mountains and mountain climbs, she revived visibly.  There, in the musty office, or in the physicians’ private rooms, arose the glorious vision of Sentis, in the face of which Mrs. Schmidt had been rocked in her cradle.  The conversation, of course, turned on Scheffel’s “Ekkehard,” the chamois reserve, Lake Constance, and St. Gall.  They recalled memories of a Rigi tour, a tour up from Lake Lucerne at Fluelen to Goeschenen, from Goeschenen to Andermatt, from Andermatt up over the Rhone glacier and down to the wonderful Grimsel Hospice, with its clear icy-cold lake, which lies in a rocky funnel, like the entrance to the kingdom of shades.  One looks about to see if Charon’s raft is not waiting.  Mrs. Schmidt said she would rather be the dirtiest shepherdess on Sentis than a physician in Meriden.

“Very well,” cried Peter, “we will cross the ocean again and settle in Berne or Zuerich.”  As always when Peter Schmidt made this proposition, Mrs. Schmidt’s face took on an expression of hard, hostile determination.  It did not escape Frederick’s notice.

Everything Mrs. Schmidt said testified to her humanity and her clear, serious, sympathetic insight.  What a pity she had forgotten how to laugh!  What a pity she was not Ratsherr Willibald Pirkheimer’s stately, respected wife, surrounded by his healthy children!  Her broad shoulders and hips, her long, thick hair required the soft curves of a body blooming in happiness, sunlight and wealth.  As it was, her face, though she was only twenty-seven years old, was fearfully worn and anxious, and her shabby clothes hung carelessly on her angular figure.  Nevertheless, Frederick perceived the beauty even in her neglected appearance.