About this story
Your mother calls you in to change your dress for a visitor: Baron von Innstetten, a district councillor from the Baltic coast who once admired her. Over tea your parents wander off to inspect the sundial, and he asks for your hand — offering respect, security and every loyalty he understands, but not love. He gives you until tomorrow; your mother comes back up the path already smiling.
Who you’ll meet
Baron Geert von Innstetten, the district councillor who has come to the garden to propose to you, with your mother Luise von Briest already smiling at the far end of the gravel path.
How it opens
The manor garden held noon heat beneath plane trees and a striped awning.
Hulda NiemeyerEffi, your mother has arranged those gooseberry skins like a funeral.
You and three friends sat sewing an altar cloth with highly negotiable devotion.
Luise von BriestEffi, come inside before our visitor arrives.
Is the visitor important enough to defeat an unfinished stitch?
Choose
I shall come if Hulda promises not to improve my sewing.
Tell me his name, and I may become punctual.