I said no more. I know what _that_ sort of playing is.

When we were lighting our bedroom candles Minora began suddenly to

speak in an unknown tongue. We stared. “What is the matter with her?”

murmured Irais.

“I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in English, “you might prefer to talk

German, and as it is all the same to me what I talk—”

“Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “We like airing our English—don’t

we, Elizabeth?”

“I don’t want my German to get rusty though,” said Minora; “I shouldn’t

like to forget it.”

“Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said Irais, twisting round her

neck as she preceded us upstairs, “‘’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wisdom

to forget’?”

“You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” I said hastily.

“What room is she in?” asked Irais.

“No. 12.”

“Oh!—do you believe in ghosts?”

Minora turned pale.

“What nonsense,” said I; “we have no ghosts here. Good-night. If you

want anything, mind you ring.”

“And if you see anything curious in that room,” called Irais from her

bedroom door, “mind you jot it down.”

_December_ 27_th_—It is the fashion, I believe, to regard Christmas as

a bore of rather a gross description, and as a time when you are

invited to over-eat yourself, and pretend to be merry without just

cause. As a matter of fact, it is one of the prettiest and most poetic

institutions possible, if observed in the proper manner, and after

having been more or less unpleasant to everybody for a whole year, it

is a blessing to be forced on that one day to be amiable, and it is

certainly delightful to be able to give presents without being haunted

by the conviction that you are spoiling the recipient, and will suffer

for it afterward. Servants are only big children, and are made just as

happy as children by little presents and nice things to eat, and, for

days beforehand, every time the three babies go into the garden they

expect to meet the Christ Child with His arms full of gifts. They

firmly believe that it is thus their presents are brought, and it is

such a charming idea that Christmas would be worth celebrating for its

sake alone.

As great secrecy is observed, the preparations devolve entirely on me,

and it is not very easy work, with so many people in our own house and

on each of the farms, and all the children, big and little, expecting

their share of happiness. The library is uninhabitable for several days

before and after, as it is there that we have the trees and presents.

All down one side are the trees, and the other three sides are lined

with tables, a separate one for each person in the house. When the

trees are lighted, and stand in their radiance shining down on the

happy faces, I forget all the trouble it has been, and the number of

times I have had to run up and down stairs, and the various aches in

head and feet, and enjoy myself as much as anybody. First the June baby

is ushered in, then the others and ourselves according to age, then the

servants, then come the head inspector and his family, the other

inspectors from the different farms, the mamsells, the bookkeepers and

secretaries, and then all the children, troops and troops of them—the

big ones leading the little ones by the hand and carrying the babies in

their arms, and the mothers peeping round the door. As many as can get

in stand in front of the trees, and sing two or three carols; then they

are given their presents, and go off triumphantly, making room for the

next batch. My three babies sang lustily too, whether they happened to

know what was being sung or not. They had on white dresses in honour of

the occasion, and the June baby was even arrayed in a low-necked and

short-sleeved garment, after the manner of Teutonic infants, whatever

the state of the thermometer. Her arms are like miniature

prize-fighter’s arms—I never saw such things; they are the pride and

joy of her little nurse, who had tied them up with blue ribbons, and

kept on kissing them. I shall certainly not be able to take her to

balls when she grows up, if she goes on having arms like that.

When they came to say good-night, they were all very pale and subdued.

The April baby had an exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, which

she said she was taking to bed, not because she liked him, but because

she was so sorry for him, he seemed so very tired. They kissed me

absently, and went away, only the April baby glancing at the trees as

she passed and making them a curtesy.

“Good-bye, trees,” I heard her say; and then she made the Japanese doll

bow to them, which he did, in a very languid and blasé fashion.

“_You’ll_ never see such trees again,” she told him, giving him a

vindictive shake, “for you’ll be brokened _long_ before next time.”

She went out, but came back as though she had forgotten something.

“Thank the _Christkind_ so _much_, Mummy, won’t you, for all the lovely

things He brought us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t you?”

I cannot see that there was anything gross about our Christmas, and we

were perfectly merry without any need to pretend, and for at least two

days it brought us a little nearer together, and made us kind.

Happiness is so wholesome; it invigorates and warms me into piety far

more effectually than any amount of trials and griefs, and an

unexpected pleasure is the surest means of bringing me to my knees. In

spite of the protestations of some peculiarly constructed persons that

they are the better for trials, I don’t believe it. Such things must

sour us, just as happiness must sweeten us, and make us kinder, and

more gentle. And will anybody affirm that it behoves us to be more

thankful for trials than for blessings? We were meant to be happy, and

to accept all the happiness offered with thankfulness—indeed, we are

none of us ever thankful enough, and yet we each get so much, so very

much, more than we deserve. I know a woman—she stayed with me last

summer—who rejoices grimly when those she loves suffer. She believes

that it is our lot, and that it braces us and does us good, and she

would shield no one from even unnecessary pain; she weeps with the

sufferer, but is convinced it is all for the best. Well, let her

continue in her dreary beliefs; she has no garden to teach her the

beauty and the happiness of holiness, nor does she in the least desire

to possess one; her convictions have the sad gray colouring of the

dingy streets and houses she lives amongst—the sad colour of humanity

in masses. Submission to what people call their “lot” is simply

ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and

take another; strike out for yourself; don’t listen to the shrieks of

your relations, to their gibes or their entreaties; don’t let your own

microscopic set prescribe your goings-out and comings-in; don’t be

afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbour in the next

house, when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything

is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize

opportunity by the scruff of the neck.

“To hear you talk,” said Irais, “no one would ever imagine that you

dream away your days in a garden with a book, and that you never in

your life seized anything by the scruff of its neck. And what is

scruff? I hope I have not got any on me.” And she craned her neck

before the glass.

She and Minora were going to help me decorate the trees, but very soon

Irais wandered off to the piano, and Minora was tired and took up a

book; so I called in Miss Jones and the babies—it was Miss Jones’s last

public appearance, as I shall relate—and after working for the best

part of two days they were finished, and looked like lovely ladies in

widespreading, sparkling petticoats, holding up their skirts with

glittering fingers. Minora wrote a long description of them for a

chapter of her book which is headed _Noel_,—I saw that much, because

she left it open on the table while she went to talk to Miss Jones.

They were fast friends from the very first, and though it is said to be

natural to take to one’s own countrymen, I am unable altogether to

sympathise with such a reason for sudden affection.

“I wonder what they talk about?” I said to Irais yesterday, when there

was no getting Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she engaged in

conversation with Miss Jones.

“Oh, my dear, how can I tell? Lovers, I suppose, or else they think

they are clever, and then they talk rubbish.”

“Well, of course, Minora thinks she is clever.”

“I suppose she does. What does it matter what she thinks? Why does your

governess look so gloomy? When I see her at luncheon I always imagine

she must have just heard that somebody is dead. But she can’t hear that

every day. What is the matter with her?”

“I don’t think she feels quite as proper as she looks,” I said

doubtfully; I was for ever trying to account for Miss Jones’s

expression.

“But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. “It would be awful for her

if she felt exactly the same as she looks.”

At that moment the door leading into the schoolroom opened softly, and

the April baby, tired of playing, came in and sat down at my feet,

leaving the door open; and this is what we heard Miss Jones saying—

“Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the conscientious place upon

themselves to appear so before their children and governess must be

terrible. Nor are clergymen more pious than other men, yet they have

continually to pose before their flock as such. As for governesses,

Miss Minora, I know what I am saying when I affirm that there is

nothing more intolerable than to have to be polite, and even humble, to

persons whose weaknesses and follies are glaringly apparent in every

word they utter, and to be forced by the presence of children and

employers to a dignity of manner in no way corresponding to one’s

feelings. The grave father of a family, who was probably one of the

least respectable of bachelors, is an interesting study at his own

table, where he is constrained to assume airs of infallibility merely

because his children are looking at him. The fact of his being a parent

does not endow him with any supreme and sudden virtue; and I can assure

you that among the eyes fixed upon him, not the least critical and

amused are those of the humble person who fills the post of governess.”

“Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely!” we heard Minora say in accents of

rapture, while we sat transfixed with horror at these sentiments. “Do

you mind if I put that down in my book? You say it all so beautifully.”

“Without a few hours of relaxation,” continued Miss Jones, “of private

indemnification for the toilsome virtues displayed in public, who could

wade through days of correct behaviour? There would be no reaction, no

room for better impulses, no place for repentance. Parents, priests,

and governesses would be in the situation of a stout lady who never has

a quiet moment in which she can take off her corsets.”

“My dear, what a firebrand!” whispered Irais. I got up and went in.

They were sitting on the sofa, Minora with clasped hands, gazing

admiringly into Miss Jones’s face, which wore a very different

expression from the one of sour and unwilling propriety I have been

used to seeing.

“May I ask you to come to tea?” I said to Minora. “And I should like to

have the children a little while.”

She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with the door open until she

had gone in and the two babies had followed. They had been playing at

stuffing each other’s ears with pieces of newspaper while Miss Jones

provided Minora with noble thoughts for her work, and had to be

tortured afterward with tweezers. I said nothing to Minora, but kept

her with us till dinner-time, and this morning we went for a long

sleigh-drive. When we came in to lunch there was no Miss Jones.

“Is Miss Jones ill?” asked Minora.

“She is gone,” I said.

“Gone?”

“Did you never hear of such things as sick mothers?” asked Irais

blandly; and we talked resolutely of something else.

All the afternoon Minora has moped. She had found a kindred spirit, and

it has been ruthlessly torn from her arms as kindred spirits so often

are. It is enough to make her mope, and it is not her fault, poor

thing, that she should have preferred the society of a Miss Jones to

that of Irais and myself.

At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head on one side. “You look so

pale,” she said; “are you not well?”

Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the patient air of one who likes

to be thought a sufferer. “I have a slight headache,” she replied

gently.

“I hope you are not going to be ill,” said Irais with great concern,

“because there is only a cow-doctor to be had here, and though he means

well, I believe he is rather rough.” Minora was plainly startled. “But

what do you do if you are ill?” she asked.

“Oh, we are never ill,” said I; “the very knowledge that there would be

no one to cure us seems to keep us healthy.”

“And if any one takes to her bed,” said Irais, “Elizabeth always calls

in the cow-doctor.”

Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that she has got into a part

of the world peopled solely by barbarians, and that the only civilised

creature besides herself has departed and left her at our mercy.

Whatever her reflections may be her symptoms are visibly abating.

_January_ 1_st_.—The service on New Year’s Eve is the only one in the

whole year that in the least impresses me in our little church, and

then the very bareness and ugliness of the place and the ceremonial

produce an effect that a snug service in a well-lit church never would.

Last night we took Irais and Minora, and drove the three lonely miles

in a sleigh. It was pitch-dark, and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped

up to our eyes in furs, and as mute as a funeral procession.

“We are going to the burial of our last year’s sins,” said Irais, as we

started; and there certainly was a funereal sort of feeling in the air.

Up in our gallery pew we tried to decipher our chorales by the light of

the spluttering tallow candles stuck in holes in the woodwork, the

flames wildly blown about by the draughts. The wind banged against the

windows in great gusts, screaming louder than the organ, and

threatening to blow out the agitated lights together. The parson in his

gloomy pulpit, surrounded by a framework of dusty carved angels, took

on an awful appearance of menacing Authority as he raised his voice to

make himself heard above the clatter. Sitting there in the dark, I felt

very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black

world. The church was as cold as a tomb; some of the candles guttered

and went out; the parson in his black robe spoke of death and judgment;

I thought I heard a child’s voice screaming, and could hardly believe

it was only the wind, and felt uneasy and full of forebodings; all my

faith and philosophy deserted me, and I had a horrid feeling that I

should probably be well punished, though for what I had no precise

idea. If it had not been so dark, and if the wind had not howled so

despairingly, I should have paid little attention to the threats

issuing from the pulpit; but, as it was, I fell to making good

resolutions. This is always a bad sign,—only those who break them make

them; and if you simply do as a matter of course that which is right as

it comes, any preparatory resolving to do so becomes completely

superfluous. I have for some years past left off making them on New

Year’s Eve, and only the gale happening as it did reduced me to doing

so last night; for I have long since discovered that, though the year

and the resolutions may be new, I myself am not, and it is worse than

useless putting new wine into old bottles.

“But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais indignantly, when I held forth

to her to the above effect a few hours later in the library, restored

to all my philosophy by the warmth and light, “and I find my

resolutions carry me very nicely into the spring. I revise them at the

end of each month, and strike out the unnecessary ones. By the end of

April they have been so severely revised that there are none left.”

“There, you see I am right; if you were not an old bottle your new

contents would gradually arrange themselves amiably as a part of you,

and the practice of your resolutions would lose its bitterness by

becoming a habit.”

She shook her head. “Such things never lose their bitterness,” she

said, “and that is why I don’t let them cling to me right into the

summer. When May comes, I give myself up to jollity with all the rest

of the world, and am too busy being happy to bother about anything I

may have resolved when the days were cold and dark.”

“And that is just why I love you,” I thought. She often says what I

feel.

“I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “whether men ever make

resolutions?”

“I don’t think they do. Only women indulge in such luxuries. It is a

nice sort of feeling, when you have nothing else to do, giving way to

endless grief and penitence, and steeping yourself to the eyes in

contrition; but it is silly. Why cry over things that are done? Why do

naughty things at all, if you are going to repent afterward? Nobody is

naughty unless they like being naughty; and nobody ever really repents

unless they are afraid they are going to be found out.”

“By ‘nobody’ of course you mean women,” said Irais.

“Naturally; the terms are synonymous. Besides, men generally have the

courage of their opinions.”

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais in the amiably

polite tone she assumes whenever she speaks to that young person.

It was getting on towards midnight, and we were sitting round the fire,

waiting for the New Year, and sipping _Glühwein_, prepared at a small

table by the Man of Wrath. It was hot, and sweet, and rather nasty, but

it is proper to drink it on this one night, so of course we did.

Minora does not like either Irais or myself. We very soon discovered

that, and laugh about it when we are alone together. I can understand

her disliking Irais, but she must be a perverse creature not to like

me. Irais has poked fun at her, and I have been, I hope, very kind; yet

we are bracketed together in her black books. It is also apparent that

she looks upon the Man of Wrath as an interesting example of an

ill-used and misunderstood husband, and she is disposed to take him

under her wing, and defend him on all occasions against us. He never

speaks to her; he is at all times a man of few words, but, as far as

Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits

sphinx-like and impenetrable while she takes us to task about some

remark of a profane nature that we may have addressed to him. One

night, some days after her arrival, she developed a skittishness of

manner which has since disappeared, and tried to be playful with him;

but you might as well try to be playful with a graven image. The wife

of one of the servants had just produced a boy, the first after a

series of five daughters, and at dinner we drank the health of all

parties concerned, the Man of Wrath making the happy father drink a

glass off at one gulp, his heels well together in military fashion.

Minora thought the incident typical of German manners, and not only

made notes about it, but joined heartily in the health-drinking, and

afterward grew skittish.

She proposed, first of all, to teach us a dance called, I think, the

Washington Post, and which was, she said, much danced in England; and,

to induce us to learn, she played the tune to us on the piano. We

remained untouched by its beauties, each buried in an easy-chair

toasting our toes at the fire. Amongst those toes were those of the Man

of Wrath, who sat peaceably reading a book and smoking. Minora

volunteered to show us the steps, and as we still did not move, danced

solitary behind our chairs. Irais did not even turn her head to look,

and I was the only one amiable or polite enough to do so. Do I deserve

to be placed in Minora’s list of disagreeable people side by side with

Irais? Certainly not. Yet I most surely am.

“It wants the music, of course,” observed Minora breathlessly, darting

in and out between the chairs, apparently addressing me, but glancing

at the Man of Wrath.

No answer from anybody.

“It is _such_ a pretty dance,” she panted again, after a few more

gyrations.

No answer.

“And is all the rage at home.”

No answer.

“Do let me teach you. Won’t _you_ try, Herr Sage?”

She went up to him and dropped him a little curtesy. It is thus she

always addresses him, entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to

every one else, that he resents it.

“Oh come, put away that tiresome old book,” she went on gaily, as he

did not move; “I am certain it is only some dry agricultural work that

you just nod over. Dancing is much better for you.” Irais and I looked

at one another quite frightened. I am sure we both turned pale when the

unhappy girl actually laid hold forcibly of his book, and, with a

playful little shriek, ran away with it into the next room, hugging it

to her bosom and looking back roguishly over her shoulder at him as she

ran. There was an awful pause. We hardly dared raise our eyes. Then the

Man of Wrath got up slowly, knocked the ashes off the end of his

cigar, looked at his watch, and went out at the opposite door into his

own rooms, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. She has never,

I must say, been skittish since.

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais, “because this sort

of conversation is likely to do you good.”

“I always listen when people talk sensibly,” replied Minora, stirring

her grog.

Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful eyebrows. “Do you agree

with our hostess’s description of women?” she asked after a pause.

“As nobodies? No, of course I do not.”

“Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we are literally nobodies in

our country. Did you know that women are forbidden to go to political

meetings here?”

“Really?” Out came the note-book.

“The law expressly forbids the attendance at such meetings of women,

children, and idiots.”

“Children and idiots—I understand that,” said Minora; “but women—and

classed with children and idiots?”

“Classed with children and idiots,” repeated Irais, gravely nodding her

head. “Did you know that the law forbids females of any age to ride on

the top of omnibuses or tramcars?”

“Not really?”

“Do you know why?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Because in going up and down the stairs those inside might perhaps

catch a glimpse of the stocking covering their ankles.”

“But what—”

“Did you know that the morals of the German public are in such a shaky

condition that a glimpse of that sort would be fatal to them?”

“But I don’t see how a stocking—”

“With stripes round it,” said Irais.

“And darns in it,” I added.

“—could possibly be pernicious?”

“‘The Pernicious Stocking; or, Thoughts on the Ethics of Petticoats,’”

said Irais. “Put that down as the name of your next book on Germany.”

“I never know,” complained Minora, letting her note-book fall, “whether

you are in earnest or not.”

“Don’t you?” said Irais sweetly.

“Is it true,” appealed Minora to the Man of Wrath, busy with his lemons

in the background, “that your law classes women with children and

idiots?”

“Certainly,” he answered promptly, “and a very proper classification,

too.”

We all looked blank. “That’s rude,” said I at last.

“Truth is always rude, my dear,” he replied complacently. Then he

added, “If I were commissioned to draw up a new legal code, and had

previously enjoyed the privilege, as I have been doing lately, of

listening to the conversation of you three young ladies, I should make

precisely the same classification.”

Even Minora was incensed at this.

“You are telling us in the most unvarnished manner that we are idiots,”

said Irais.

“Idiots? No, no, by no means. But children,—nice little agreeable

children. I very much like to hear you talk together. It is all so

young and fresh what you think and what you believe, and not of the

least consequence to any one.”

“Not of the least consequence?” cried Minora. “What we believe is of

very great consequence indeed to us.”

“Are you jeering at our beliefs?” inquired Irais sternly.

“Not for worlds. I would not on any account disturb or change your

pretty little beliefs. It is your chief charm that you always believe

every-thing. How desperate would our case be if young ladies only

believed facts, and never accepted another person’s assurance, but

preferred the evidence of their own eyes! They would have no illusions,

and a woman without illusions is the dreariest and most difficult thing

to manage possible.”

“Thing?” protested Irais.

The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, makes up for it from time to time

by holding forth at unnecessary length. He took up his stand now with

his back to the fire, and a glass of _Glühwein_ in his hand. Minora had

hardly heard his voice before, so quiet had he been since she came, and

sat with her pencil raised, ready to fix for ever the wisdom that

should flow from his lips.

“What would become of poetry if women became so sensible that they

turned a deaf ear to the poetic platitudes of love? That love does

indulge in platitudes I suppose you will admit.” He looked at Irais.

“Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” she acknowledged.

“Who could murmur pretty speeches on the beauty of a common sacrifice,

if the listener’s want of imagination was such as to enable her only to

distinguish one victim in the picture, and that one herself?”

Minora took that down word for word,—much good may it do her.

“Who would be brave enough to affirm that if refused he will die, if

his assurances merely elicit a recommendation to diet himself, and take

plenty of outdoor exercise? Women are responsible for such lies,

because they believe them. Their amazing vanity makes them swallow

flattery so gross that it is an insult, and men will always be ready to

tell the precise number of lies that a woman is ready to listen to. Who

indulges more recklessly in glowing exaggerations than the lover who

hopes, and has not yet obtained? He will, like the nightingale, sing

with unceasing modulations, display all his talent, untiringly repeat

his sweetest notes, until he has what he wants, when his song, like the

nightingale’s, immediately ceases, never again to be heard.”

“Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to Minora—unnecessary advice,

for her pencil was scribbling as fast as it could.

“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, after having had ninety-nine

object-lessons in the difference between promise and performance and

the emptiness of pretty speeches, the beginning of the hundredth will

find her lending the same willing and enchanted ear to the eloquence of

flattery as she did on the occasion of the first. What can the

exhortations of the strong-minded sister, who has never had these

experiences, do for such a woman? It is useless to tell her she is

man’s victim, that she is his plaything, that she is cheated,

down-trodden, kept under, laughed at, shabbily treated in every

way—that is not a true statement of the case. She is simply the victim

of her own vanity, and against that, against the belief in her own

fascinations, against the very part of herself that gives all the

colour to her life, who shall expect a woman to take up arms?”

“Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais with a shocked face, “and

had you lent a willing ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine before

you reached your final destiny?”

“I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I replied, “for nobody ever

wanted me to listen to blandishments.”

Minora sighed.

“I like to hear you talk together about the position of women,” he went

on, “and wonder when you will realise that they hold exactly the

position they are fitted for. As soon as they are fit to occupy a

better, no power on earth will be able to keep them out of it.

Meanwhile, let me warn you that, as things now are, only strong-minded

women wish to see you the equals of men, and the strong-minded are

invariably plain. The pretty ones would rather see men their slaves

than their equals.”

“You know,” said Irais, frowning, “that I consider myself

strong-minded.”

“And never rise till lunch-time?”

Irais blushed. Although I don’t approve of such conduct, it is very

convenient in more ways than one; I get through my housekeeping

undisturbed, and whenever she is disposed to lecture me, I begin about

this habit of hers. Her conscience must be terribly stricken on the

point, for she is by no means as a rule given to meekness.

“A woman without vanity would be unattackable,” resumed the Man of

Wrath. “When a girl enters that downward path that leads to ruin, she

is led solely by her own vanity; for in these days of policemen no

young woman can be forced against her will from the path of virtue, and

the cries of the injured are never heard until the destroyer begins to

express his penitence for having destroyed. If his passion could remain

at white-heat and he could continue to feed her ear with the

protestations she loves, no principles of piety or virtue would disturb

the happiness of his companion; for a mournful experience teaches that

piety begins only where passion ends, and that principles are strongest

where temptations are most rare.”

“But what has all this to do with us?” I inquired severely.

“You were displeased at our law classing you as it does, and I merely

wish to justify it,” he answered. “Creatures who habitually say _yes_

to everything a man proposes, when no one can oblige them to say it,

and when it is so often fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.”

“I shall never say it to you again, my dear man,” I said.

“And not only _that_ fatal weakness,” he continued, “but what is there,

candidly, to distinguish you from children? You are older, but not

wiser,—really not so wise, for with years you lose the common sense you

had as children. Have you ever heard a group of women talking

reasonably together?”

“Yes—we do!” Irais and I cried in a breath.

“It has interested me,” went on the Man of Wrath, “in my idle moments,

to listen to their talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little

stories they told of their best friends who were absent, to note the

spiteful little digs they gave their best friends who were present, to

watch the utter incredulity with which they listened to the tale of

some other woman’s conquests, the radiant good faith they displayed in

connection with their own, the instant collapse into boredom, if some

topic of so-called general interest, by some extraordinary chance, were

introduced.”

“You must have belonged to a particularly nice set,” remarked Irais.

“And as for politics,” he said, “I have never heard them mentioned

among women.”

“Children and idiots are not interested in such things,” I said.

“And we are much too frightened of being put in prison,” said Irais.

“In prison?” echoed Minora.

“Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to her “that if you talk about

such things here you run a great risk of being imprisoned?”

“But why?”

“But why? Because, though you yourself may have meant nothing but what

was innocent, your words may have suggested something less innocent to

the evil minds of your hearers; and then the law steps in, and calls it

_dolus eventualis_, and everybody says how dreadful, and off you go to

prison and are punished as you deserve to be.”

Minora looked mystified.

“That is not, however, your real reason for not discussing them,” said

the Man of Wrath; “they simply do not interest you. Or it may be, that

you do not consider your female friends’ opinions worth listening to,

for you certainly display an astonishing thirst for information when

male politicians are present. I have seen a pretty young woman, hardly

in her twenties, sitting a whole evening drinking in the doubtful

wisdom of an elderly political star, with every appearance of eager

interest. He was a bimetallic star, and was giving her whole

pamphletsful of information.”

“She wanted to make up to him for some reason,” said Irais, “and got

him to explain his hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be taken

in. Now which was the sillier in that case?”

She threw herself back in her chair and looked up defiantly, beating

her foot impatiently on the carpet.

“She wanted to be thought clever,” said the Man of Wrath. “What puzzled

me,” he went on musingly, “was that she went away apparently as serene

and happy as when she came. The explanation of the principles of

bimetallism produce, as a rule, a contrary effect.”

“Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, “and your simple star

had been making a fine goose of himself the whole evening.

“Prattle, prattle, simple star,

Bimetallic, _wunderbar_.

Though you’re given to describe

Woman as a _dummes Weib_.

You yourself are sillier far,

Prattling, bimetallic star!”

“No doubt she had understood very little,” said the Man of Wrath,

taking no notice of this effusion.

“And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t understood much either.” Irais was

plainly irritated.

“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a very small voice, “is not a

high one. But, in the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one

could take her place?”

“If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I said, “I must tell you that

I believe he married chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a

strange woman to nurse him when he is sick.”

“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her illusions were being

knocked about, “the sick-room is surely the very place of all others in

which a woman’s gentleness and tact are most valuable.”

“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of Wrath. “I have never met

those qualities in the professional nurse. According to my experience,

she is a disagreeable person who finds in private nursing exquisite

opportunities for asserting her superiority over ordinary and prostrate

mankind. I know of no more humiliating position for a man than to be in

bed having his feverish brow soothed by a sprucely-dressed strange

woman, bristling with starch and spotlessness. He would give half his

income for his clothes, and probably the other half if she would leave

him alone, and go away altogether. He feels her superiority through

every pore; he never before realised how absolutely inferior he is; he

is abjectly polite, and contemptibly conciliatory; if a friend comes to

see him, he eagerly praises her in case she should be listening behind

the screen; he cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far more

intolerable, neither is he sure that his body really belongs to him; he

has read of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman’s hand,

but the day on which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks

in private fills him with the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt

as a homesick schoolboy at the end of his first term.”

Minora was silent. Irais’s foot was livelier than ever. The Man of

Wrath stood smiling blandly down upon us. You can’t argue with a person

so utterly convinced of his infallibility that he won’t even get angry

with you; so we sat round and said nothing.

“If,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked rebellious, “you doubt

the truth of my remarks, and still cling to the old poetic notion of

noble, self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the patient over the

rough places on the road to death or recovery, let me beg you to try

for yourself, next time any one in your house is ill, whether the

actual fact in any way corresponds to the picturesque belief. The angel

who is to alleviate our sufferings comes in such a questionable shape,

that to the unimaginative she appears merely as an extremely

self-confident young woman, wisely concerned first of all in securing

her personal comfort, much given to complaints about her food and to

helplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary

capacity for fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the superior

being she knows herself to be, morbidly anxious lest the servants

should, by some mistake, treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish

if the patient gives more trouble than she had expected, intensely

injured and disagreeable if he is made so courageous by his

wretchedness as to wake her during the night—an act of desperation of

which I was guilty once, and once only. Oh, these good women! What sane

man wants to have to do with angels? And especially do we object to

having them about us when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in every

fibre what poor things we are, and when all our fortitude is needed to

enable us to bear our temporary inferiority patiently, without being

forced besides to assume an attitude of eager and grovelling politeness

towards the angel in the house.”

There was a pause.

“I didn’t know you could talk so much, Sage,” said Irais at length.

“What would you have women do, then?” asked Minora meekly. Irais began

to beat her foot up and down again,—what did it matter what Men of

Wrath would have us do? “There are not,” continued Minora, blushing,

“husbands enough for every one, and the rest must do something.”

“Certainly,” replied the oracle. “Study the art of pleasing by dress

and manner as long as you are of an age to interest us, and above all,

let all women, pretty and plain, married and single, study the art of

cookery. If you are an artist in the kitchen you will always be

esteemed.”

I sat very still. Every German woman, even the wayward Irais, has

learned to cook; I seem to have been the only one who was naughty and

wouldn’t.

“Only be careful,” he went on, “in studying both arts, never to forget

the great truth that dinner precedes blandishments and not

blandishments dinner. A man must be made comfortable before he will

make love to you; and though it is true that if you offered him a

choice between _Spickgans_ and kisses, he would say he would take both,

yet he would invariably begin with the _Spickgans_, and allow the

kisses to wait.”

At this I got up, and Irais followed my example. “Your cynicism is

disgusting,” I said icily.

“You two are always exceptions to anything I may say,” he said, smiling

amiably.

He stooped and kissed Irais’s hand. She is inordinately vain of her

hands, and says her husband married her for their sake, which I can

quite believe. I am glad they are on her and not on Minora, for if

Minora had had them I should have been annoyed. Minora’s are bony, with

chilly-looking knuckles, ignored nails, and too much wrist. I feel very

well disposed towards her when my eye falls on them. She put one

forward now, evidently thinking it would be kissed too.

“Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the movement, “that it is the custom

here to kiss women’s hands?”

“But only married women’s,” I added, not desiring her to feel out of

it, “never young girls’.”

She drew it in again. “It is a pretty custom,” she said with a sigh;

and pensively inscribed it in her book.

_January_ 15_th_.—The bills for my roses and bulbs and other last

year’s horticultural indulgences were all on the table when I came down

to breakfast this morning. They rather frightened me. Gardening is

expensive, I find, when it has to be paid for out of one’s own private

pin-money. The Man of Wrath does not in the least want roses, or

flowering shrubs, or plantations, or new paths, and therefore, he asks,

why should he pay for them? So he does not and I do, and I have to make

up for it by not indulging all too riotously in new clothes, which is

no doubt very chastening. I certainly prefer buying new rose-trees to

new dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and I see a time coming

when the passion for my garden will have taken such a hold on me that I

shall not only entirely cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell

those that I already have. The garden is so big that everything has to

be bought wholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to go on much

longer with only one man and a stork, because the more I plant the more

there will be to water in the inevitable drought, and the watering is a

serious consideration when it means going backwards and forwards all

day long to a pump near the house, with a little water-cart. People

living in England, in almost perpetual mildness and moisture, don’t

really know what a drought is. If they have some weeks of cloudless

weather, it is generally preceded and followed by good rains; but we

have perhaps an hour’s shower every week, and then comes a month or six

weeks’ drought. The soil is very light, and dries so quickly that,

after the heaviest thunder-shower, I can walk over any of my paths in

my thin shoes; and to keep the garden even moderately damp it should

pour with rain regularly every day for three hours. My only means of

getting water is to go to the pump near the house, or to the little

stream that forms my eastern boundary, and the little stream dries up

too unless there has been rain, and is at the best of times difficult

to get at, having steep banks covered with forget-me-nots. I possess

one moist, peaty bit of ground, and that is to be planted with silver

birches in imitation of the Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between

the birches with flaming azaleas. All the rest of my soil is sandy—the

soil for pines and acacias, but not the soil for roses; yet see what

love will do—there are more roses in my garden than any other flower!

Next spring the bare places are to be filled with trees that I have

ordered: pines behind the delicate acacias, and startling

mountain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches, maples, larches,

juniper-trees—was it not Elijah who sat down to rest under a

juniper-tree? I have often wondered how he managed to get under it. It

is a compact little tree, not more than two to three yards high here,

and all closely squeezed up together. Perhaps they grew more

aggressively where he was. By the time the babies have grown old and

disagreeable it will be very pretty here, and then possibly they won’t

like it; and, if they have inherited the Man of Wrath’s indifference to

gardens, they will let it run wild and leave it to return to the state

in which I found it. Or perhaps their three husbands will refuse to

live in it, or to come to such a lonely place at all, and then of

course its fate is sealed. My only comfort is that husbands don’t

flourish in the desert, and that the three will have to wait a long

time before enough are found to go round. Mothers tell me that it is a

dreadful business finding one husband; how much more painful then to

have to look for three at once!—the babies are so nearly the same age

that they only just escaped being twins. But I won’t look. I can

imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides, I

don’t think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have. I

shall do my best in the years at my disposal to train them so to love

the garden, and out-door life, and even farming, that, if they have a

spark of their mother in them, they will want and ask for nothing

better. My hope of success is however exceedingly small, and there is

probably a fearful period in store for me when I shall be taken every

day during the winter to the distant towns to balls—a poor old mother

shivering in broad daylight in her party gown, and being made to start

after an early lunch and not getting home till breakfast-time next

morning. Indeed, they have already developed an alarming desire to go

to “partings” as they call them, the April baby announcing her

intention of beginning to do so when she is twelve. “Are _you_ twelve,

Mummy?” she asked.

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, and I am trying to find

another. It is grievous changing so often—in two years I shall have had

three—because at each change a great part of my plants and plans

necessarily suffers. Seeds get lost, seedlings are not pricked out in

time, places already sown are planted with something else, and there is

confusion out of doors and despair in my heart. But he was to have

married the cook, and the cook saw a ghost and immediately left, and he

is going after her as soon as he can, and meanwhile is wasting visibly

away. What she saw was doors that are locked opening with a great

clatter all by themselves _on the hinge-side_, and then somebody

invisible cursed at her. These phenomena now go by the name of “the

ghost.” She asked to be allowed to leave at once, as she had never been

in a place where there was a ghost before. I suggested that she should

try and get used to it; but she thought it would be wasting time, and

she looked so ill that I let her go, and the garden has to suffer. I

don’t know why it should be given to cooks to see such interesting

things and withheld from me, but I have had two others since she left,

and they both have seen the ghost. Minora grows very silent as bed-time

approaches, and relents towards Irais and myself; and, after having

shown us all day how little she approves us, when the bedroom candles

are brought she quite begins to cling. She has once or twice anxiously

inquired whether Irais is sure she does not object to sleeping alone.

“If you are at all nervous, I will come and keep you company,” she

said; “I don’t mind at all, I assure you.”

But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple wiles, and has told me

she would rather sleep with fifty ghosts than with one Minora.

Since Miss Jones was so unexpectedly called away to her parent’s

bedside I have seen a good deal of the babies; and it is so nice

without a governess that I would put off engaging another for a year or

two, if it were not that I should in so doing come within the reach of

the arm of the law, which is what every German spends his life in

trying to avoid. The April baby will be six next month, and, after her

sixth birthday is passed, we are liable at any moment to receive a

visit from a school inspector, who will inquire curiously into the

state of her education, and, if it is not up to the required standard,

all sorts of fearful things might happen to the guilty parents,

probably beginning with fines, and going on _crescendo_ to dungeons if,

owing to gaps between governesses and difficulties in finding the right

one, we persisted in our evil courses. Shades of the prison-house begin

to close here upon the growing boy, and prisons compass the Teuton

about on every side all through life to such an extent that he has to

walk very delicately indeed if he would stay outside them and pay for

their maintenance. Cultured individuals do not, as a rule, neglect to

teach their offspring to read, and write, and say their prayers, and

are apt to resent the intrusion of an examining inspector into their

homes; but it does not much matter after all, and I daresay it is very

good for us to be worried; indeed, a philosopher of my acquaintance

declares that people who are not regularly and properly worried are

never any good for anything. In the eye of the law we are all sinners,

and every man is held to be guilty until he has proved that he is

innocent.

Minora has seen so much of the babies that, after vainly trying to get

out of their way for several days, she thought it better to resign

herself, and make the best of it by regarding them as copy, and using

them to fill a chapter in her book. So she took to dogging their

footsteps wherever they went, attended their uprisings and their lyings

down, engaged them, if she could, in intelligent conversation, went

with them into the garden to study their ways when they were sleighing,

drawn by a big dog, and generally made their lives a burden to them.

This went on for three days, and then she settled down to write the

result with the Man of Wrath’s typewriter, borrowed whenever her notes

for any chapter have reached the state of ripeness necessary for the

process she describes as “throwing into form.” She writes everything

with a typewriter, even her private letters.

“Don’t forget to put in something about a mother’s knee,” said Irais;

“you can’t write effectively about children without that.”

“Oh, of course I shall mention that,” replied Minora.

“And pink toes,” I added. “There are always toes, and they are never

anything but pink.”

“I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turning over her notes.

“But, after all, babies are not a German speciality,” said Irais, “and

I don’t quite see why you should bring them into a book of German

travels. Elizabeth’s babies have each got the fashionable number of

arms and legs, and are exactly the same as English ones.”

“Oh, but they can’t be _just_ the same, you know,” said Minora, looking

worried. “It must make a difference living here in this place, and

eating such odd things, and never having a doctor, and never being ill.

Children who have never had measles and those things can’t be quite the

same as other children; it must all be in their systems and can’t get

out for some reason or other. And a child brought up on chicken and

rice-pudding must be different to a child that eats _Spickgans_ and

liver sausages. And they _are_ different; I can’t tell in what way, but

they certainly are; and I think if I steadily describe them from the

materials I have collected the last three days, I may perhaps hit on

the points of difference.”

“Why bother about points of difference?” asked Irais. “I should write

some little thing, bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such as

knees and toes, and make it mildly pathetic.”

“But it is by no means an easy thing for me to do,” said Minora

plaintively; “I have so little experience of children.”

“Then why write it at all?” asked that sensible person Elizabeth.

“I have as little experience as you,” said Irais, “because I have no

children; but if you don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing

is easier than to write bits about them. I believe I could do a dozen

in an hour.”

She sat down at the writing-table, took up an old letter, and scribbled

for about five minutes. “There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “you

may have it—pink toes and all complete.”

Minora put on her eye-glasses and read aloud:

“When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her hymns at bed-time my stale

and battered soul is filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories crowd

into my mind—memories of my own mother and myself—how many years

ago!—of the sweet helplessness of being gathered up half asleep in her

arms, and undressed, and put in my cot, without being wakened; of the

angels I believed in; of little children coming straight from heaven,

and still being surrounded, so long as they were good, by the shadow of

white wings,—all the dear poetic nonsense learned, just as my baby is

learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has not an idea of the beauty of

the charming things she is told, and stares wide-eyed, with heavenly

eyes, while her mother talks of the heaven she has so lately come from,

and is relieved and comforted by the interrupting bread and milk. At

two years old she does not understand angels, and does understand bread

and milk; at five she has vague notions about them, and prefers bread

and milk; at ten both bread and milk and angels have been left behind

in the nursery, and she has already found out that they are luxuries

not necessary to her everyday life. In later years she may be

disinclined to accept truths second-hand, insist on thinking for

herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off exploded traditions, be

untiring in her efforts to live according to a high moral standard and

to be strong, and pure, and good—”

“Like tea,” explained Irais.

“—yet will she never, with all her virtues, possess one-thousandth part

of the charm that clung about her when she sang, with quiet eyelids,

her first reluctant hymns, kneeling on her mother’s knees. I love to

come in at bed-time and sit in the window in the setting sunshine

watching the mysteries of her going to bed. Her mother tubs her, for

she is far too precious to be touched by any nurse, and then she is

rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her little pink toes peep out;

and when she is powdered, and combed, and tied up in her night-dress,

and all her curls are on end, and her ears glowing, she is knelt down

on her mother’s lap, a little bundle of fragrant flesh, and her face

reflects the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes through her evening

prayer for pity and for peace.”

“How very curious!” said Minora, when she had finished. “That is

exactly what I was going to say.”

“Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of putting it together; you can

copy that if you like.”

“But have you a stale soul, Miss Minora?” I asked.

“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a good touch,” she replied;

“it will make people really think a man wrote the book. You know I am

going to take a man’s name.”

“That is precisely what I imagined,” said Irais. “You will call

yourself John Jones, or George Potts, or some such sternly commonplace

name, to emphasise your uncompromising attitude towards all feminine

weaknesses, and no one will be taken in.”

“I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me later, when the click of

Minora’s typewriter was heard hesitating in the next room, “that you

and I are writing her book for her. She takes down everything we say.

Why does she copy all that about the baby? I wonder why mothers’ knees

are supposed to be touching? I never learned anything at them, did you?

But then in my case they were only stepmother’s, and nobody ever sings

their praises.”

“My mother was always at parties,” I said; “and the nurse made me say

my prayers in French.”

“And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, “when I was a baby such

things were not the fashion. There were never any bathrooms, and no

tubs; our faces and hands were washed, and there was a foot-bath in the

room, and in the summer we had a bath and were put to bed afterwards

for fear we might catch cold. My stepmother didn’t worry much; she used

to wear pink dresses all over lace, and the older she got the prettier

the dresses got. When is she going?”

“Who? Minora? I haven’t asked her that.”

“Then I will. It is really bad for her art to be neglected like this.

She has been here an unconscionable time,—it must be nearly three

weeks.”

“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said pleasantly.

Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting that it is not worse to

neglect one’s art than one’s husband, and her husband is lying all this

time stretched on a bed of sickness, while she is spending her days so

agreeably with me. She has a way of forgetting that she has a home, or

any other business in the world than just to stay on chatting with me,

and reading, and singing, and laughing at any one there is to laugh at,

and kissing the babies, and tilting with the Man of Wrath. Naturally I

love her—she is so pretty that anybody with eyes in his head must love

her—but too much of anything is bad, and next month the passages and

offices are to be whitewashed, and people who have ever whitewashed

their houses inside know what nice places they are to live in while it

is being done; and there will be no dinner for Irais, and none of those

succulent salads full of caraway seeds that she so devotedly loves. I

shall begin to lead her thoughts gently back to her duties by inquiring

every day anxiously after her husband’s health. She is not very fond of

him, because he does not run and hold the door open for her every time

she gets up to leave the room; and though she has asked him to do so,

and told him how much she wishes he would, he still won’t. She stayed

once in a house where there was an Englishman, and his nimbleness in

regard to doors and chairs so impressed her that her husband has had no

peace since, and each time she has to go out of a room she is reminded

of her disregarded wishes, so that a shut door is to her symbolic of

the failure of her married life, and the very sight of one makes her

wonder why she was born; at least, that is what she told me once, in a

burst of confidence. He is quite a nice, harmless little man, pleasant

to talk to, good-tempered, and full of fun; but he thinks he is too old

to begin to learn new and uncomfortable ways, and he has that horror of

being made better by his wife that distinguishes so many righteous men,

and is shared by the Man of Wrath, who persists in holding his glass in

his left hand at meals, because if he did not (and I don’t believe he

particularly likes doing it) his relations might say that marriage has

improved him, and thus drive the iron into his soul. This habit

occasions an almost daily argument between one or other of the babies

and myself.

“April, hold your glass in your right hand.”

“But papa doesn’t.”

“When you are as old as papa you can do as you like.”

Which was embellished only yesterday by Minora adding impressively,

“And only think how strange it would look if _everybody_ held their

glasses so.”

April was greatly struck by the force of this proposition.

_January_ 28_th_.—It is very cold,—fifteen degrees of frost _Réaumur_,

but perfectly delicious, still, bright weather, and one feels jolly and

energetic and amiably disposed towards everybody. The two young ladies

are still here, but the air is so buoyant that even they don’t weigh on

me any longer, and besides, they have both announced their approaching

departure, so that after all I shall get my whitewashing done in peace,

and the house will have on its clean pinafore in time to welcome the

spring.

Minora has painted my portrait, and is going to present it as a parting

gift to the Man of Wrath; and the fact that I let her do it, and sat

meekly times innumerable, proves conclusively, I hope, that I am not

vain. When Irais first saw it she laughed till she cried, and at once

commissioned her to paint hers, so that she may take it away with her

and give it to her husband on his birthday, which happens to be early

in February. Indeed, if it were not for this birthday, I really think

she would have forgotten to go at all; but birthdays are great and

solemn festivals with us, never allowed to slip by unnoticed, and

always celebrated in the presence of a sympathetic crowd of relations

(gathered from far and near to tell you how well you are wearing, and

that nobody would ever dream, and that really it is wonderful), who

stand round a sort of sacrificial altar, on which your years are

offered up as a burnt-offering to the gods in the shape of lighted pink

and white candles, stuck in a very large, flat, jammy cake. The cake

with its candles is the chief feature, and on the table round it lie

the gifts each person present is more or less bound to give. As my

birthday falls in the winter I get mittens as well as blotting-books

and photograph-frames, and if it were in the summer I should get

photograph-frames and blotting-books and no mittens; but whatever the

present may be, and by whomsoever given, it has to be welcomed with the

noisiest gratitude, and loudest exclamations of joy, and such words as

_entzückend, reizend, herrlich, wundervoll_, and _süss_ repeated over

and over again, until the unfortunate _Geburtstagskind_ feels indeed

that another year has gone, and that she has grown older, and wiser,

and more tired of folly and of vain repetitions. A flag is hoisted, and

all the morning the rites are celebrated, the cake eaten, healths

drunk, speeches made, and hands nearly shaken off. The neighbouring

parsons drive up, and when nobody is looking their wives count the

candles in the cake; the active lady in the next _Schloss_ spares time

to send a pot of flowers, and to look up my age in the _Gotha

Almanach;_ a deputation comes from the farms headed by the chief

inspector in white kid gloves who invokes Heaven’s blessings on the

gracious lady’s head; and the babies are enchanted, and sit in a corner

trying on all the mittens. In the evening there is a dinner for the

relations and the chief local authorities, with more health-drinking

and speechifying, and the next morning, when I come downstairs thankful

to have done with it, I am confronted by the altar still in its place,

cake crumbs and candle-grease and all, because any hasty removal of it

would imply a most lamentable want of sentiment, deplorable in anybody,

but scandalous and disgusting in a tender female. All birthdays are

observed in this fashion, and not a few wise persons go for a short

trip just about the time theirs is due, and I think I shall imitate

them next year; only trips to the country or seaside in December are

not usually pleasant, and if I go to a town there are sure to be

relations in it, and then the cake will spring up mushroom-like from

the teeming soil of their affection.

I hope it has been made evident in these pages how superior Irais and

myself are to the ordinary weaknesses of mankind; if any further proof

were needed, it is furnished by the fact that we both, in defiance of

tradition, scorn this celebration of birthday rites. Years ago, when

first I knew her, and long before we were either of us married, I sent

her a little brass candlestick on her birthday; and when mine followed

a few months later, she sent me a note-book. No notes were written in

it, and on her next birthday I presented it to her; she thanked me

profusely in the customary manner, and when my turn came I received the

brass candlestick. Since then we alternately enjoy the possession of

each of these articles, and the present question is comfortably settled

once and for all, at a minimum of trouble and expense. We never mention

this little arrangement except at the proper time, when we send a

letter of fervid thanks.

This radiant weather, when mere living is a joy, and sitting still over

the fire out of the question, has been going on for more than a week.

Sleighing and skating have been our chief occupation, especially

skating, which is more than usually fascinating here, because the place

is intersected by small canals communicating with a lake and the river

belonging to the lake, and as everything is frozen black and hard, we

can skate for miles straight ahead without being obliged to turn round

and come back again,—at all times an annoying, and even mortifying,

proceeding. Irais skates beautifully: modesty is the only obstacle to

my saying the same of myself; but I may remark that all Germans skate

well, for the simple reason that every year of their lives, for three

or four months, they may do it as much as they like. Minora was

astonished and disconcerted by finding herself left behind, and

arriving at the place where tea meets us half an hour after we had

finished. In some places the banks of the canals are so high that only

our heads appear level with the fields, and it is, as Minora noted in

her book, a curious sight to see three female heads skimming along

apparently by themselves, and enjoying it tremendously. When the banks

are low, we appear to be gliding deliciously over the roughest ploughed

fields, with or without legs according to circumstances. Before we

start, I fix on the place where tea and a sleigh are to meet us, and we

drive home again; because skating against the wind is as detestable as

skating with it is delightful, and an unkind Nature arranges its

blowing without the smallest regard for our convenience. Yesterday, by

way of a change, we went for a picnic to the shores of the Baltic,

ice-bound at this season, and utterly desolate at our nearest point. I

have a weakness for picnics, especially in winter, when the mosquitoes

cease from troubling and the ant-hills are at rest; and of all my many

favourite picnic spots this one on the Baltic is the loveliest and

best. As it is a three-hours’ drive, the Man of Wrath is loud in his

lamentations when the special sort of weather comes which means, as

experience has taught him, this particular excursion. There must be

deep snow, hard frost, no wind, and a cloudless sky; and when, on

waking up, I see these conditions fulfilled, then it would need some

very potent reason to keep me from having out a sleigh and going off.

It is, I admit, a hard day for the horses; but why have horses if they

are not to take you where you want to go to, and at the time you want

to go? And why should not horses have hard days as well as everybody

else? The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye for nature and

frozen seas, and is simply bored by a long drive through a forest that

does not belong to him; a single turnip on his own place is more

admirable in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that

ever reared its snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. Now

observe the superiority of woman, who sees that both are good, and

after having gazed at the pine and been made happy by its beauty, goes

home and placidly eats the turnip. He went once and only once to this

particular place, and made us feel so small by his _blasé_ behaviour

that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot, endless forest

stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach; and after

driving through it for miles you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue

of arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with the

orange-coloured sails of distant fishing-smacks shining in the

sunlight. Whenever I have been there it has been windless weather, and

the silence so profound that I could hear my pulses beating. The

humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are the only sounds

in summer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness of death.

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and this one is so infested by

mosquitoes during the season when picnics seem most natural, that those

of my visitors who have been taken there for a treat have invariably

lost their tempers, and made the quiet shores ring with their wailing

and lamentations. These despicable but irritating insects don’t seem to

have anything to do but to sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for

any prey Providence may send them; and as soon as the carriage appears

they rise up in a cloud, and rush to meet us, almost dragging us out

bodily, and never leave us until we drive away again. The sudden view

of the sea from the mossy, pine-covered height directly above it where

we picnic; the wonderful stretch of lonely shore with the forest to the

water’s edge; the coloured sails in the blue distance; the freshness,

the brightness, the vastness—all is lost upon the picnickers, and made

worse than indifferent to them, by the perpetual necessity they are

under of fighting these horrid creatures. It is nice being the only

person who ever goes there or shows it to anybody, but if more people

went, perhaps the mosquitoes would be less lean, and hungry, and

pleased to see us. It has, however, the advantage of being a suitable

place to which to take refractory visitors when they have stayed too

long, or left my books out in the garden all night, or otherwise made

their presence a burden too grievous to be borne; then one fine hot

morning when they are all looking limp, I suddenly propose a picnic on

the Baltic. I have never known this proposal fail to be greeted with

exclamations of surprise and delight.

“The Baltic! You never told us you were within driving distance? How

_heavenly_ to get a breath of sea air on a day like this! The very

_thought_ puts new life into one! And how _delightful_ to see the

Baltic! Oh, _please_ take us!” And then I take them.

But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience is as clear as the frosty

air itself, and yesterday morning we started off in the gayest of

spirits, even Minora being disposed to laugh immoderately on the least

provocation. Only our eyes were allowed to peep out from the fur and

woollen wrappings necessary to our heads if we would come back with our

ears and noses in the same places they were in when we started, and for

the first two miles the mirth created by each other’s strange

appearance was uproarious,—a fact I mention merely to show what an

effect dry, bright, intense cold produces on healthy bodies, and how

much better it is to go out in it and enjoy it than to stay indoors and

sulk. As we passed through the neighbouring village with cracking of

whip and jingling of bells, heads popped up at the windows to stare,

and the only living thing in the silent, sunny street was a melancholy

fowl with ruffled feathers, which looked at us reproachfully, as we

dashed with so much energy over the crackling snow.

“Oh, foolish bird!” Irais called out as we passed; “you’ll be indeed a

cold fowl if you stand there motionless, and every one prefers them hot

in weather like this!”

And then we all laughed exceedingly, as though the most splendid joke

had been made, and before we had done we were out of the village and in

the open country beyond, and could see my house and garden far away

behind, glittering in the sunshine; and in front of us lay the forest,

with its vistas of pines stretching away into infinity, and a drive

through it of fourteen miles before we reached the sea. It was a

hoar-frost day, and the forest was an enchanted forest leading into

fairyland, and though Irais and I have been there often before, and

always thought it beautiful, yet yesterday we stood under the final

arch of frosted trees, struck silent by the sheer loveliness of the

place. For a long way out the sea was frozen, and then there was a deep

blue line, and a cluster of motionless orange sails; at our feet a

narrow strip of pale yellow sand; right and left the line of sparkling

forest; and we ourselves standing in a world of white and diamond

traceries. The stillness of an eternal Sunday lay on the place like a

benediction.

Minora broke the silence by remarking that Dresden was pretty, but she

thought this beat it almost.

“I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed voice, as though she were

in a holy place, “how the two can be compared.”

“Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of course,” replied Minora; after

which we turned away and thought we would keep her quiet by feeding

her, so we went back to the sleigh and had the horses taken out and

their cloths put on, and they were walked up and down a distant glade

while we sat in the sleigh and picnicked. It _is_ a hard day for the

horses,—nearly thirty miles there and back and no stable in the middle;

but they are so fat and spoiled that it cannot do them much harm

sometimes to taste the bitterness of life. I warmed soup in a little

apparatus I have for such occasions, which helped to take the

chilliness off the sandwiches,—this is the only unpleasant part of a

winter picnic, the clammy quality of the provisions just when you most

long for something very hot. Minora let her nose very carefully out of

its wrappings, took a mouthful, and covered it up quickly again. She

was nervous lest it should be frost-nipped, and truth compels me to add

that her nose is not a bad nose, and might even be pretty on anybody

else; but she does not know how to carry it, and there is an art in the

angle at which one’s nose is held just as in everything else, and

really noses were intended for something besides mere blowing.

It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat sandwiches with

immense fur and woollen gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much

fur as anything, and choked exceedingly during the process. Minora was

angry at this, and at last pulled off her glove, but quickly put it on

again.

“How very unpleasant,” she remarked after swallowing a large piece of

fur.

“It will wrap round your pipes, and keep them warm,” said Irais.

“Pipes!” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by such vulgarity.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she continued to choke and

splutter; “we are all in the same case, and I don’t know how to alter

it.”

“There are such things as forks, I suppose,” snapped Minora.

“That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obviousness of the remedy; but of

what use are forks if they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to

continue to eat her gloves.

By the time we had finished, the sun was already low behind the trees

and the clouds beginning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman was

given sandwiches and soup, and while he led the horses up and down with

one hand and held his lunch in the other, we packed up—or, to be

correct, I packed, and the others looked on and gave me valuable

advice.

This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years old, and was born on the

place, and has driven its occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as

fond of him as I am of the sun-dial; indeed, I don’t know what I should

do without him, so entirely does he appear to understand and approve of

my tastes and wishes. No drive is too long or difficult for the horses

if I want to take it, no place impossible to reach if I want to go to

it, no weather or roads too bad to prevent my going out if I wish to:

to all my suggestions he responds with the readiest cheerfulness, and

smoothes away all objections raised by the Man of Wrath, who rewards

his alacrity in doing my pleasure by speaking of him as an _alter

Esel_. In the summer, on fine evenings, I love to drive late and alone

in the scented forests, and when I have reached a dark part stop, and

sit quite still, listening to the nightingales repeating their little

tune over and over again after interludes of gurgling, or if there are

no nightingales, listening to the marvellous silence, and letting its

blessedness descend into my very soul. The nightingales in the forests

about here all sing the same tune, and in the same key of (E flat).

I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, or if it is peculiar to

this particular spot. When they have sung it once, they clear their

throats a little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it is the

prettiest little song in the world. How could I indulge my passion for

these drives with their pauses without Peter? He is so used to them

that he stops now at the right moment without having to be told, and he

is ready to drive me all night if I wish it, with no sign of anything

but cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The Man of Wrath

deplores these eccentric tastes, as he calls them, of mine; but has

given up trying to prevent my indulging them because, while he is

deploring in one part of the house, I have slipped out at a door in the

other, and am gone before he can catch me, and have reached and am lost

in the shadows of the forest by the time he has discovered that I am

nowhere to be found.

The brightness of Peter’s perfections are sullied however by one spot,

and that is, that as age creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold the

horses in if they don’t want to be held in, but he goes to sleep

sometimes on his box if I have him out too soon after lunch, and has

upset me twice within the last year—once last winter out of a sleigh,

and once this summer, when the horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted

into the ditch on one side of the _chaussée_ (German for high road),

and the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that it shied too

into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, and the

bicycle was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, except Peter, who

never lost his pleasant smile, and looked so placid that my tongue

clave to the roof of my mouth when I tried to make it scold him.

“But I should think he ought to have been _thoroughly_ scolded on an

occasion like that,” said Minora, to whom I had been telling this story

as we wandered on the yellow sands while the horses were being put in

the sleigh; and she glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head was

visible between the bushes above us. “Shall we get home before dark?”

she asked.

The sun had altogether disappeared behind the pines and only the very

highest of the little clouds were still pink; out at sea the mists were

creeping up, and the sails of the fishing-smacks had turned a dull

brown; a flight of wild geese passed across the disc of the moon with

loud cacklings.

“Before dark?” echoed Irais, “I should think not. It is dark now nearly

in the forest, and we shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.”

“But it is surely very dangerous to let a man who goes to sleep drive

you,” said Minora apprehensively.

“But he’s such an old dear,” I said.

“Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied testily; “but there are wakeful old

dears to be had, and on a box they are preferable.”

Irais laughed. “You are growing quite amusing, Miss Minora,” she said.

“He isn’t on a box to-day,” said I; “and I never knew him to go to

sleep standing up behind us on a sleigh.” But Minora was not to be

appeased, and muttered something about seeing no fun in foolhardiness,

which shows how alarmed she was, for it was rude.

Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the way home, and Irais and I at

least were as happy as possible driving back, with all the glories of

the western sky flashing at us every now and then at the end of a long

avenue as we swiftly passed, and later on, when they had faded, myriads

of stars in the narrow black strip of sky over our heads. It was

bitterly cold, and Minora was silent, and not in the least inclined to

laugh with us as she had been six hours before.

“Have you enjoyed yourself, Miss Minora?’ inquired Irais, as we got out

of the forest on to the _chaussée_, and the lights of the village

before ours twinkled in the distance.

“How many degrees do you suppose there are now?” was Minora’s reply to

this question.

“Degrees?—Of frost? Oh, dear me, are you cold,” cried Irais

solicitously.

“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said Minora sulkily; and Irais

pinched me. “Well, but think how much colder you would have been

without all that fur you ate for lunch inside you,” she said.

“And what a nice chapter you will be able to write about the Baltic,”

said I. “Why, it is practically certain that you are the first English

person who has ever been to just this part of it.”

“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, “about being the first who

ever burst—”

“‘Into that silent sea,’” finished Minora hastily. “You can’t quote

that without its context, you know.”

“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly; “I only paused to breathe.

I must breathe, or perhaps I might die.”

The lights from my energetic friend’s _Schloss_ shone brightly down

upon us as we passed round the base of the hill on which it stands; she

is very proud of this hill, as well she may be, seeing that it is the

only one in the whole district.

“Do you never go there?” asked Minora, jerking her head in the

direction of the house.

“Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and I should feel I was in the

way if I went often.”

“It would be interesting to see another North German interior,” said

Minora; “and I should be obliged if you would take me.”

“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a strange girl,” I protested;

“and we are not at all on such intimate terms as to justify my taking

all my visitors to see her.”

“What do you want to see another interior for?” asked Irais. “I can

tell you what it is like; and if you went nobody would speak to you,

and if you were to ask questions, and began to take notes, the good

lady would stare at you in the frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth

had brought a young lunatic out for an airing. _Everybody_ is not as

patient as Elizabeth,” added Irais, anxious to pay off old scores.

“I would do a great deal for you, Miss Minora,” I said, “but I can’t do

that.”

“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I would be placed with great

ceremony on a sofa behind a large, polished oval table with a

crochet-mat in the centre—it _has_ got a crochet-mat in the centre,

hasn’t it?” I nodded. “And you would sit on one of the four little

podgy, buttony, tasselly red chairs that are ranged on the other side

of the table facing the sofa. They _are_ red, Elizabeth?” Again I

nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, and there is no carpet except a

rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark chocolate colour, almost

black; that is in order that after years of use the dirt may not show,

and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like wickedness, you see,

Miss Minora—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows so

much as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At

intervals round the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on

them, and in one corner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?”

she asked, turning to me.

“No, it is white.”

“There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air

and the sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains

under heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just

opposite, with peering eyes at every window trying to look in, instead

of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. No fire, no sunlight,

no books, no flowers; but a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up

under the door, mixed, in due season, with soapsuds.”

“When did you go there?” asked Minora.

“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been

calling there all my life.”

Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the

depths of her head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark

eyelashes, and far be it from me to deny that each eye taken by itself

is fine, but they are put in all wrong.

“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be the

significance of sofa corners in Germany. If we three went there

together, I should be ushered into the right-hand corner of the sofa,

because it is the place of honour, and I am the greatest stranger;

Elizabeth would be invited to seat herself in the left-hand corner, as

next in importance; the hostess would sit near us in an arm-chair; and

you, as a person of no importance whatever, would either be left to sit

where you could, or would be put on a chair facing us, and with the

entire breadth of the table between us to mark the immense social gulf

that separates the married woman from the mere virgin. These sofa

corners make the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a way that

nothing else could. The world might come to an end, and create less

sensation in doing it, than you would, Miss Minora, if by any chance

you got into the right-hand corner of one. That you are put on a chair

on the other side of the table places you at once in the scale of

precedence, and exactly defines your social position, or rather your

complete want of a social position.” And Irais tilted her nose ever so

little heavenwards.

“Note it,” she added, “as the heading of your next chapter.”

“Note what?” asked Minora impatiently.

“Why, ‘The Subtle Significance of Sofas’, of course,” replied Irais.

“If,” she continued, as Minora made no reply appreciative of this

suggestion, “you were to call unexpectedly, the bad luck which pursues

the innocent would most likely make you hit on a washing-day, and the

distracted mistress of the house would keep you waiting in the cold

room so long while she changed her dress, that you would begin to fear

you were to be left to perish from want and hunger; and when she did

appear, would show by the bitterness of her welcoming smile the rage

that was boiling in her heart.”

“But what has the mistress of the house to do with washing?”

“What has she to do with washing? Oh, you sweet innocent—pardon my

familiarity, but such ignorance of country-life customs is very

touching in one who is writing a book about them.”

“Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” said Minora loftily.

“Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “are seasons set apart by the

_Hausfrau_ to be kept holy. They only occur every two or three months,

and while they are going on the whole house is in an uproar, every

other consideration sacrificed, husband and children sunk into

insignificance, and no one approaching, or interfering with the

mistress of the house during these days of purification, but at their

peril.”

“You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “that you only wash your clothes

four times a year?”

“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais.

“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said Minora emphatically.

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of hers. “Then you must

take care and not marry a German,” she said.

“But what is the object of it?” went on Minora.

“Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.”

“Yes, yes, but why only at such long intervals?”

“It is an outward and visible sign of vast possessions in the shape of

linen. If you were to want to have your clothes washed every week, as

you do in England, you would be put down as a person who only has just

enough to last that length of time, and would be an object of general

contempt.”

“But I should be a clean object,” cried Minora, “and my house would not

be full of accumulated dirt.”

We said nothing—there was nothing to be said.

“It must be a happy land, that England of yours,” Irais remarked after

a while with a sigh—a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her

mind of a land full of washerwomen and agile gentlemen darting at

door-handles.

“It is a _clean_ land, at any rate,” replied Minora.

“_I_ don’t want to go and live in it,” I said—for we were driving up to

the house, and a memory of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as I

looked up fondly at its dear old west front, and I felt that what I

want is to live and die just here, and that there never was such a

happy woman as Elizabeth.

_April_ 18_th_.—I have been so busy ever since Irais and Minora left

that I can hardly believe the spring is here, and the garden hurrying

on its green and flowered petticoat—only its petticoat as yet, for

though the underwood is a fairyland of tender little leaves, the trees

above are still quite bare.

February was gone before I well knew that it had come, so deeply was I

engaged in making hot-beds, and having them sown with petunias,

verbenas, and nicotina affinis; while no less than thirty are dedicated

solely to vegetables, it having been borne in upon me lately that

vegetables must be interesting things to grow, besides possessing solid

virtues not given to flowers, and that I might as well take the orchard

and kitchen garden under my wing. So I have rushed in with all the zeal

of utter inexperience, and my February evenings were spent poring over

gardening books, and my days in applying the freshly absorbed wisdom.

Who says that February is a dull, sad, slow month in the country? It

was of the cheerfullest, swiftest description here, and its mild days

enabled me to get on beautifully with the digging and manuring, and

filled my rooms with snowdrops. The longer I live the greater is my

respect and affection for manure in all its forms, and already, though

the year is so young, a considerable portion of its pin-money has been

spent on artificial manure. The Man of Wrath says he never met a young

woman who spent her money that way before; I remarked that it must be

nice to have an original wife; and he retorted that the word original

hardly described me, and that the word eccentric was the one required.

Very well, I suppose I am eccentric, since even my husband says so; but

if my eccentricities are of such a practical nature as to result later

in the biggest cauliflowers and tenderest lettuce in Prussia, why then

he ought to be the first to rise up and call me blessed.

I sent to England for vegetable-marrow seeds, as they are not grown

here, and people try and make boiled cucumbers take their place; but

boiled cucumbers are nasty things, and I don’t see why marrows should

not do here perfectly well. These, and primrose-roots, are the English

contributions to my garden. I brought over the roots in a tin box last

time I came from England, and am anxious to see whether they will

consent to live here. Certain it is that they don’t exist in the

Fatherland, so I can only conclude the winter kills them, for surely,

if such lovely things would grow, they never would have been

overlooked. Irais is deeply interested in the experiment; she reads so

many English books, and has heard so much about primroses, and they

have got so mixed up in her mind with leagues, and dames, and

Disraelis, that she longs to see this mysterious political flower, and

has made me promise to telegraph when it appears, and she will come

over. But they are not going to do anything this year, and I only hope

those cold days did not send them off to the Paradise of flowers. I am

afraid their first impression of Germany was a chilly one.

Irais writes about once a week, and inquires after the garden and the

babies, and announces her intention of coming back as soon as the

numerous relations staying with her have left,—“which they won’t do,”

she wrote the other day, “until the first frosts nip them off, when

they will disappear like belated dahlias—double ones of course, for

single dahlias are too charming to be compared to relations. I have

every sort of cousin and uncle and aunt here, and here they have been

ever since my husband’s birthday—not the same ones exactly, but I get

so confused that I never know where one ends and the other begins. My

husband goes off after breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and I

am left at their mercy. I wish I had crops to go and look at—I should

be grateful even for one, and would look at it from morning till night,

and quite stare it out of countenance, sooner than stay at home and

have the truth told me by enigmatic aunts. Do you know my Aunt Bertha?

she, in particular, spends her time propounding obscure questions for

my solution. I get so tired and worried trying to guess the answers,

which are always truths supposed to be good for me to hear. ‘Why do you

wear your hair on your forehead?’ she asks,—and that sets me off

wondering why I _do_ wear it on my forehead, and what she wants to know

for, or whether she does know and only wants to know if I will answer

truthfully. ‘I am sure I don’t know, aunt,’ I say meekly, after

puzzling over it for ever so long; ‘perhaps my maid knows. Shall I ring

and ask her?’ And then she informs me that I wear it so to hide an ugly

line she says I have down the middle of my forehead, and that betokens

a listless and discontented disposition. Well, if she knew, what did

she ask me for? Whenever I am with them they ask me riddles like that,

and I simply lead a _dog’s_ life. Oh, my dear, relations are like

drugs,—useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small

quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the

truly wise avoid them.”

From Minora I have only had one communication since her departure, in

which she thanked me for her pleasant visit, and said she was sending

me a bottle of English embrocation to rub on my bruises after skating;

that it was wonderful stuff, and she was sure I would like it; and that

it cost two marks, and would I send stamps. I pondered long over this.

Was it a parting hit, intended as revenge for our having laughed at

her? Was she personally interested in the sale of embrocation? Or was

it merely Minora’s idea of a graceful return for my hospitality? As for

bruises, nobody who skates decently regards it as a bruise-producing

exercise, and whenever there were any they were all on Minora; but she

did happen to turn round once, I remember, just as I was in the act of

tumbling down for the first and only time, and her delight was but

thinly veiled by her excessive solicitude and sympathy. I sent her the

stamps, received the bottle, and resolved to let her drop out of my

life; I had been a good Samaritan to her at the request of my friend,

but the best of Samaritans resents the offer of healing oil for his own

use. But why waste a thought on Minora at Easter, the real beginning of

the year in defiance of calendars. She belongs to the winter that is

past, to the darkness that is over, and has no part or lot in the life

I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could dance and sing for

joy that the spring is here! What a resurrection of beauty there is in

my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart! The whole of this radiant

Easter day I have spent out of doors, sitting at first among the

windflowers and celandines, and then, later, walking with the babies to

the Hirschwald, to see what the spring had been doing there; and the

afternoon was so hot that we lay a long time on the turf, blinking up

through the leafless branches of the silver birches at the soft, fat

little white clouds floating motionless in the blue. We had tea on the

grass in the sun, and when it began to grow late, and the babies were

in bed, and all the little wind-flowers folded up for the night, I

still wandered in the green paths, my heart full of happiest gratitude.

It makes one very humble to see oneself surrounded by such a wealth of

beauty and perfection _anonymously_ lavished, and to think of the

infinite meanness of our own grudging charities, and how displeased we

are if they are not promptly and properly appreciated. I do sincerely

trust that the benediction that is always awaiting me in my garden may

by degrees be more deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and

patience, and cheerfulness, just like the happy flowers I so much love.