them good? You'd be
interested in them at once if you'd look upon them as patients.'

I put my arm through hers and drew her out of the room. 'This stuffy
room is enough to depress anybody,' I said. 'And I know what's worrying
you--it's that widow.'

'I know what's an irritating trick of yours,' exclaimed Charlotte,
turning on me, 'it's always explaining the reason why I say or feel what
I do say or feel.'

'What, and isn't there any reason?'

'That widow has no power to worry me. Her hypocrisy will bear its own
fruit, and she will have to eat it. Then, when the catastrophe comes,
the sure consequence of folly and weakness, she'll do what you all do in
face of the inevitable--sit and lament and say it was somebody else's
fault. And of course every single thing that happens to you is never
anybody's fault but your own miserable self's.'

'I wish you would teach me to dodge what you call the inevitable,' I
said.

'As though it wanted any teaching,' said Charlotte stopping short in the
middle of the open space before our table to look into my eyes. 'You've
only not got to be silly.'

'But what am I to do if I am silly--naturally silly--born it?'

'The tea is getting very cold,' called out Mrs. Harvey-Browne
plaintively. She had been watching us with impatience, and seemed
perturbed. The moment we got near enough she informed us that the
tourists were such that no decent woman could stand it. 'Ambrose has
gone off with one of them,' she said,--'a most terrible old man--to look
at some view over there. Would you believe it, while we were quietly
sitting here not harming anybody, this person came up the hill and
immediately began to talk to us as if we knew each other? He actually
had the audacity to ask if he might sit with us at this table, as there
was no room elsewhere. He was _most_ objectionable. Of course I refused.
The most pushing person I have met at all.'

'But there is ample room,' said Charlotte, to whom everything the
bishop's wife said and did appeared bad.

'But, my dear Frau Nieberlein, a complete stranger! And such an
unpleasantly jocular old man. And I think it so very ill-bred to be
jocular in the wrong places.'

'I always think it a pity to cold-shoulder people,' said Charlotte
sternly. She was not, it seemed, going to stand any nonsense from the
bishop's wife.

'You must be dying for some tea,' I interposed, pouring it out as one
who should pour oil on troubled waters.

'And you should