consider,' continued Charlotte, 'that in fifty years we
shall all be dead, and our opportunities for being kind will be over.'

'My dear Frau Nieberlein!' ejaculated the astonished bishop's wife.

'Why, it isn't certain,' I said. 'You'll only be eighty then, Charlotte,
and what is eighty? When I am eighty I hope to be a gay granddame
skilled in gestic lore, frisking beneath the burthen of fourscore.'

But the bishop's wife did not like being told she would be dead in fifty
years, and no artless quotations of mine could make her like it; so she
drank her tea with an offended face. 'Perhaps, then,' she remarked, 'you
will tell me I ought to have accepted the proposal one of the other
tourists, a woman, made me a moment ago. She suggested that I should
drive back to Sassnitz with her and her party, and halve the expense of
the fly.'

'Well, and why should you not?' said Charlotte.

'Why should I not? There were two excellent reasons why I should not.
First, because it was an impertinence; and secondly, because I am going
back in the boat.'

'The second reason is good, but you must pardon my seeing no excellence
whatever in the first.'

'Your son's tea will be undrinkable,' I said, feebly interrupting. I can
never see two people contradicting each other without feeling wretched.
Why contradict? Why argue at all? Only one's Best-Beloved, one's Closest
and Most Understanding should be contradicted and argued with. How
simple to keep quiet with all the rest and agree to everything they say.
Charlotte up to this had kept very quiet in the presence of Mrs.
Harvey-Browne, had said yes in the right places, and had only been
listless and bored. Now, after reading her own explosive pamphlet for an
hour, stirred besides by the widow's base behaviour and by the failure
of her effort to induce penitence in Hedwig by means of punishment, she
was in the strenuous mood again, and inclined to see all manner of
horrid truths and fates hovering round the harmless tea-table, where
denser eyes like mine, and no doubt Mrs. Harvey-Browne's, only saw a
pleasant flicker of beech leaves over cups and saucers, and bland
strawberries in a nest of green.

'If women did not regard each other's advances with so much suspicion,'
Charlotte proceeded emphatically, 'if they did not look upon every one
of a slightly different class as an impossible person to be avoided,
they would make a much better show in the fight for independent
existence. The