"whom then do you consider the true woman?"
"She is the incarnation of comprehending Love!"

"But my dear Frau Professor," protested Frau Kellermann, "you must remember
that one has so few opportunities for exhibiting Love within the family

circle nowadays. One's husband is at business all day, and naturally
desires to sleep when he returns home--one's children are out of the lap

and in at the university before one can lavish anything at all upon them!"
"But Love is not a question of lavishing," said the Advanced Lady. "It is

the lamp carried in the bosom touching with serene rays all the heights and
depths of--"

"Darkest Africa," I murmured flippantly.
She did not hear.

"The mistake we have made in the past--as a sex," said she, "is in not
realising that our gifts of giving are for the whole world--we are the glad

sacrifice of ourselves!"
"Oh!" cried Elsa rapturously, and almost bursting into gifts as she

breathed--"how I know that! You know ever since Fritz and I have been
engaged, I share the desire to give to everybody, to share everything!"

"How extremely dangerous," said I.
"It is only the beauty of danger, or the danger of beauty" said the

Advanced Lady--"and there you have the ideal of my book--that woman is
nothing but a gift."

I smiled at her very sweetly. "Do you know," I said, "I, too, would like
to write a book, on the advisability of caring for daughters, and taking

them for airings and keeping them out of kitchens!"
I think the masculine element must have felt these angry vibrations: they

ceased from singing, and together we climbed out of the wood, to see
Schlingen below us, tucked in a circle of hills, the white houses shining

in the sunlight, "for all the world like eggs in a bird's nest", as Herr
Erchardt declared. We descended upon Schlingen and demanded sour milk with

fresh cream and bread at the Inn of the Golden Stag, a most friendly place,
with tables in a rose-garden where hens and chickens ran riot--even

flopping upon the disused tables and pecking at the red checks on the
cloths. We broke the bread into the bowls, added the cream, and stirred it

round with flat wooden spoons, the landlord and his wife standing by.
"Splendid weather!" said Herr Erchardt, waving his spoon at the landlord,

who shrugged his shoulders.
"What! you don't call it splendid!"

"As you please," said the landlord, obviously scorning us.
"Such a beautiful walk," said Fraulein Elsa, making a free gift of her most

charming smile to the landlady.
"I never walk," said the landlady; "when I go to Mindelbau my man drives

me--I've more important things to do with my legs than walk them through
the dust!"

"I like these people," confessed Herr Langen to me. "I like them very,
very much. I think I shall take a room here for the whole summer."

"Why?"
"Oh, because they live close to the earth, and thereforedespise it."

He pushed away his bowl of sour milk and lit a cigarette. We ate, solidly
and seriously, until those seven and a half kilometres to Mindelbau

stretched before us like an eternity. Even Karl's activity became so full
fed that he lay on the ground and removed his leather waistbelt. Elsa

suddenly leaned over to Fritz and whispered, who on hearing her to the end
and asking her if she loved him, got up and made a little speech.

"We--we wish to celebrate our betrothal by--by--asking you all to drive
back with us in the landlord's cart--if--it will hold us!"

"Oh, what a beautiful, noble idea!" said Frau Kellermann, heaving a sigh of
relief that audibly burst two hooks.

"It is my little gift," said Elsa to the Advanced Lady, who by virtue of
three portions almost wept tears of gratitude.

Squeezed into the peasant cart and driven by the landlord, who showed his
contempt for mother earth by spitting savagely every now and again, we

jolted home again, and the nearer we came to Mindelbau the more we loved it
and one another.

"We must have many excursions like this," said Herr Erchardt to me, "for
one surely gets to know a person in the simple surroundings of the open

air--one SHARES the same joys--one feels friendship. What is it your
Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. The friends thou hast, and their

adoption tried--grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel!"
"But," said I, feeling very friendly towards him, "the bother about my soul

is that it refuses to grapple anybody at all--and I am sure that the dead
weight of a friend whose adoption it had tried would kill it immediately.

Never yet has it shown the slightest sign of a hoop!"
He bumped against my knees and excused himself and the cart.

"My dear little lady, you must not take the quotation literally.
Naturally, one is not physicallyconscious of the hoops; but hoops there

are in the soul of him or her who loves his fellow-men...Take this
afternoon, for instance. How did we start out? As strangers you might

almost say, and yet--all of us--how have we come home?"
"In a cart," said the only remaining joy, who sat upon his mother's lap and

felt sick.
We skirted the field that we had passed through, going round by the

cemetery. Herr Langen leaned over the edge of the seat and greeted the
graves. He was sitting next to the Advanced Lady--inside the shelter of

her shoulder. I heard her murmur: "You look like a little boy with your
hair blowing about in the wind." Herr Langen, slightly less bitter--

watched the last graves disappear. And I heard her murmur: "Why are you
so sad? I too am very sad sometimes--but--you look young enough for me to

dare to say this--I--too--know of much joy!"
"What do you know?" said he.

I leaned over and touched the Advanced Lady's hand. "Hasn't it been a nice
afternoon?" I said questioningly. "But you know, that theory of yours

about women and Love--it's as old as the hills--oh, older!"
From the road a sudden shout of triumph. Yes, there he was again--white

beard, silk handkerchief and undaunted enthusiasm.
"What did I say? Eight kilometres--it is!"

"Seven and a half!" shrieked Herr Erchardt.
"Why, then, do you return in carts? Eight kilometres it must be."

Herr Erchardt made a cup of his hands and stood up in the jolting cart
while Frau Kellermann clung to his knees. "Seven and a half!"

"Ignorance must not go uncontradicted!" I said to the Advanced Lady.
12. THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM.

The landlady knocked at the door.
"Come in," said Viola.

"There is a letter for you," said the landlady, "a special letter"--she
held the green envelope in a corner of her dingy apron.

"Thanks." Viola, kneeling on the floor, poking at the little dusty stove,
stretched out her hand. "Any answer?"

"No; the messenger has gone."
"Oh, all right!" She did not look the landlady in the face; she was

ashamed of not having paid her rent, and wondered grimly, without any hope,
if the woman would begin to bluster again.

"About this money owing to me--" said the landlady.
"Oh, the Lord--off she goes!" thought Viola, turning her back on the woman

and making a grimace at the stove.
"It's settle--or it's go!" The landlady raised her voice; she began to

bawl. "I'm a landlady, I am, and a respectable woman, I'll have you know.
I'll have no lice in my house, sneaking their way into the furniture and

eating up everything. It's cash--or out you go before twelve o'clock to-
morrow."

Viola felt rather than saw the woman's gesture. She shot out her arm in a
stupid helpless way, as though a dirty pigeon had suddenly flown at her

face. "Filthy old beast! Ugh! And the smell of her--like stale cheese
and damp washing."

"Very well!" she answered shortly; "it's cash down or I leave to-morrow.
All right: don't shout."