nignly into the distant corner placed at the disposal of the
obscure.

Six months later she married the professor. Her family wept and implored
in vain; told her in vain of the terrificness of marrying a widower with
seven children all older than herself. Charlotte was blinded by the
glory of having been chosen by the greatest man Oxford had ever seen.
Oxford was everything to her. Her distant German home and its spiritless
inhabitants were objects only of her good-natured shrugs. She wrote to
me saying she was going to be the life companion of the finest thinker
of the age; her people, so illiterate and so full of prejudices, could
not, she supposed, be expected to appreciate the splendour of her
prospects; she thanked heaven that her own education had saved her from
such a laughable blindness; she could conceive nothing more glorious
than marrying the man in all the world whom you most reverently admire,
than being chosen as the sharer of his thoughts, and the partner of his
intellectual joys. After that I seldom heard from her. She lived in the
south of Germany, and her professor's fame waxed vaster every year.
Every year, too, she brought a potential professor into a world already
so full of them, and every year death cut short its career after a
period varying from ten days to a fortnight, and the _Kreuzzeitung_
seemed perpetually to be announcing that _Heute frueh ist meine liebe
Frau Charlotte von einem strammen Jungen leicht und gluecklich entbunden
worden_, and _Heute starb unser Sohn Bernhard im zarten Alter von zwei
Wochen_. None of the children lived long enough to meet the next
brother, and they were steadily christened Bernhard, after a father
apparently thirsting to perpetuate his name. It became at last quite
uncomfortable. Charlotte seemed never to be out of the _Kreuzzeitung_.
For six years she and the poor little Bernhards went on in this manner,
haunting its birth and death columns, and then abruptly disappeared from
them; and the next I heard of her was that she was in England,--in
London, Oxford, and other intellectual centres, lecturing in the cause
of Woman. The _Kreuzzeitung_ began about her again, but on another page.
The _Kreuzzeitung_ was shocked; for Charlotte was emancipated.
Charlotte's family was so much shocked that it was hysterical.
Charlotte, not content with lecturing, wrote pamphlets,--lofty documents
of a deadly earnestness, in German and English, and they might be seen
any day in