value of co-operation is so gigantic----'

'Ah yes, I fancy I remember your saying something like this at that
lecture in Oxford last winter,' interrupted Mrs. Harvey-Browne with an
immense plaintiveness.

'It cannot be said too often.'

'Oh yes dear Frau Nieberlein, believe me it can. What, for instance, has
it to do with my being asked to drive back to Sassnitz with a strange
family in a fly?'

'Why, with that it has very much to do,' I interposed, smiling
pleasantly on them both. 'You would have paid half. And what is
co-operation if it is not paying half? Indeed, I've been told by people
who have done it that it sometimes even means paying all. In which case
you don't see its point.'

'What I mean, of course,' said Charlotte, 'is moral co-operation. A
ceaseless working together of its members for the welfare of the sex. No
opportunity should ever be lost. One should always be ready to talk to,
to get to know, to encourage. One must cultivate a large love for
humanity to whatever class it belongs, and however individually
objectionable it is. You, no doubt,' she continued, waving her teaspoon
at the staring bishop's wife, 'curtly refused the very innocent
invitation of your fellow-creature because she was badly dressed and had
manners of a type with which you are not acquainted. You considered it
an impertinence--nay, more than an impertinence, an insult, to be
approached in such a manner. Now, how can you tell'--(here she leaned
across the table, and in her earnestness pointed the teaspoon straight
at Mrs. Harvey-Browne, who stared harder than ever)--'how will you ever
know that the woman did not happen to be full, full to the brim, of that
good soil in which the seed of a few encouraging words dropped during
your drive would have produced a splendid harvest of energy and
freedom?'

'But my dear Frau Nieberlein,' said the bishop's wife, much taken aback
by this striking image, 'I do not think she was full of anything of the
kind. She did not look so, anyhow. And I myself, to pursue your
metaphor, am hardly fitted for the office of an agricultural implement.
I believe all these things are done nowadays by machinery, are they
not?' she asked, turning to me in a well-meant effort to get away from
the subject. 'The old-fashioned and picturesque sower has been quite
superseded, has he not?'

'Why are you talking about farming?' asked Ambrose, who came up at this
moment.

'We are talking of the farming of souls