'Why, we can, when we get there, and it's no use bothering till we are
there. But I'm sure she'll wait till I come. Let us go in out of the
rain.'

'I will hire a cart,' he announced with great determination.

'What, and go on without me?'

'I tell thee I will hire a cart. No time shall be lost.'

And he ran back again to the landlord who was watching us from the door
with much disapproval; for I suppose Charlotte's refusal to consider his
accommodation worthy of her had not disposed him well towards her
friends, and possibly he considered the Professor's rapid movements
among the puddles too unaccountable to be nice. There was no cart, he
said, absolutely none; and the Professor, in a state of fuming
dejection, was forced to what resignation he could muster.

During this parleying I had been sitting alone under the umbrella, the
rain falling monotonously on its vast surface, running off the glazed
lid of my yellow bandbox in streams, and dripping from the brim of
August's hat down his patient neck. A yard or two behind sat Gertrud on
the hold-all, dimly visible through the cloud of steam rising from the
back of her soaked cart-horse. I could hear the sea at the foot of the
cliff sluggishly heaving on and off the shingle, and I could see it over
the edge of the cliff to the east, and here for the first time round the
bend of the island to the north. It was flat, oily, and brown. Never was
such a dreary sea or such a melancholy spot. I got out and went into the
house feeling depressed.

The landlord led us into a room at the back, the room in front being for
the use of fishermen wishing to drink. Clouds of smoke and a great
clamour smote our senses when he opened the door. The room was full of
what looked like an excursion; about thirty people, male and female,
sitting at narrow tables eating, chattering, singing, and smoking all at
once. Three specially variegated young women, dressed in the flimsiest
of fine-weather clothes, all damp muslin and feathers, pretty girls with
pronounced hair arrangements, were smoking cigarettes; and in the corner
near the door, demure and solitary, sat another pretty young woman in
black, with a very small bonnet trimmed with a very big Alsatian bow on
the back of a very elaborately curled head. Her eyes were discreetly
fixed on a Wiener Schnitzel that she was eating with a singular
mincingness; and all those young men who could not get near the girls in
muslin, were doing their ut