at, but he would not impart wisdom; and the
longer he patted the more perfect did his serenity seem to become. When
people approached us and showed a tendency to hang on the great man's
lips, he looked up with a happy smile and said, 'This is my little
cousin--we have much to say to each other,' and turned his back on them.
And when I was asked whether I had not spent a memorable, an elevating
evening, being talked to so much by the famous Nieberlein, I could only
put on a solemn face and say that I should not soon forget it. 'It will
be something to tell your children of, in the days to come when he is a
splendid memory,' said the enthusiast.

'Oh won't it!' I ejaculated, with the turned-up eyes of rapture.

'Tell me one thing,' I said to Charlotte as we walked slowly along the
sands towards the cliff and the beechwood; 'why, since you took me for a
stranger, were you so--well, so gracious to me in the water?'

Gertrud had gone back to the hotel laden with both our bathing-things.
'She may as well take mine up at the same time,' Charlotte had remarked,
piling them on Gertrud's passive arms. Undeniably she might; and
accordingly she did. But her face was wry, and so had been the smile
with which she returned Charlotte's careless greetings. 'You still keep
that old fool, I see,' said Charlotte. 'It would send me mad to have a
person of inferior intellect for ever fussing round me.'

'It would send me much madder to have a person of superior intellect
buttoning my boots and scorning me while she does it,' I replied.

'Why was I so gracious to you in the water?' repeated Charlotte in
answer to my inquiry, made not without anxiousness, for one likes to
know one's own cousin above the practices of ordinary bath-guests. 'I'll
tell you why. I detest the stiff, icy way women have of turning their
backs if they don't know each other.'

'Oh they're not very stiff,' I remarked, thinking of past bathing
experiences, 'and besides, in the water----'

'It is not only unkind, it is simply wicked. For how shall we ever be
anything but tools and drudges if we don't co-operate, if we don't stand
shoulder to shoulder? Oh my heart goes out to all women! I never see one
without feeling I must do all in my power to get to know her, to help
her, to show her what she must do, so that when her youth is gone there
will still be something left, a so much nobler happiness, a so much
truer joy.'

'Than what?' I asked, puzzled.

Charlotte w