ttle that my companion was sure I was one of the most
intelligent women he had ever met. I know he thought so, for he turned
suddenly to me as we were walking past the Frau Foerster's wash-house and
rose-garden up to the chestnuts, and said, 'How is it that German women
are so infinitely more intellectual than English women?'

Intellectual! How nice. And all the result of keeping quiet in the right
places.

'I did not know they were,' I said modestly; which was true.

'Oh but they are,' he assured me with great positiveness; and added,
'Perhaps you have noticed that I am English?'

Noticed that he was English? From the moment I first saw his collar I
suspected it; from the moment he opened his mouth and spoke I knew it;
and so did everybody else under the chestnuts who heard him speaking as
he passed. But why not please this artless young man? So I looked at him
with the raised eyebrows of intense surprise and said, 'Oh, are you
English?'

'I have been a good deal in Germany,' he said, looking happy.

'But it is extraordinary,' I said.

'It is not so very difficult,' he said, looking more and more happy.

'But really not German? _Fabelhaft_.'

The young man's belief in my intelligence was now unshakeable. The Frau
Foerster, who had seen me disembark and set out for my walk alone, and
who saw me now returning with a companion of the other sex, greeted me
coldly. Her coldness, I felt, was not unjustifiable. It is not my
practice to set out by myself and come back telling youths I have never
seen before that their accomplishments are _fabelhaft_. I began to feel
coldly towards myself, and turning to the young man said good-bye with
some abruptness.

'Are you going in?' he asked.

'I am not staying here.'

'But the launch does not start for an hour. I go across too, then.'

'I am not crossing in the launch. I came over in a fishing-smack.'

'Oh really?' He seemed to meditate. 'How delightfully independent,' he
added.

'Have you not observed that the German Fraeulein is as independent as she
is intellectual?'

'No, I have not. That is just where I think the Germans are so far
behind us. Their women have nothing like the freedom ours have.'

'What, not when they sail about all alone in fishing-smacks?'

'That certainly is unusually enterprising. May I see you safely into
it?'

The Frau Foerster came towards us and told him that the food he had
ordered for eight o'clock was ready.

'No, thank you,' I