"Mind you choose him well!" said Winnington, with a shrug. His eyes at that moment were critically bent on a group of Berliners, men of the commercial and stock-broking class, who, with their wives, had arrived a couple of nights before. The men were strolling and smoking below. They were all fat, red-faced and overbearing. When they went for walks, the man stalked in front along the forest paths, and the woman followed behind, carrying her own jacket. Winnington wondered what it might be like to be the wife of any of them. These _Herren_ at any rate might not be the worse for a little hustling from the "woman movement." He could not, however, say honestly that the wives shewed any consciousness of ill-fortune. They were almost all plump, plumper even than their husbands, expensively dressed and prosperous looking; and the amount of Viennese beer they consumed at the forest restaurants to which their husbands conducted them, seemed to the Englishman portentous. "Yes, my daughter is old-fashioned," resumed the ex-judge, complacently, after a pause. "And I am grateful to Miss Johnson, who has trained her very well. If she were like some of the girls one sees now! Last year there was a young lady here--_Ach, Gott!_" He raised his shoulders, with a contemptuous mouth. "Miss Blanchflower?" asked Winnington, turning towards the speaker with sudden interest. "That I believe was her name. She was mad, of course. _Ach_, they have told you?--of that _Vortrag_ she gave?--and the rest? After ten minutes, I made a sign to my daughter, and we walked out. I would not have had her corrupted with these ideas for the whole world. And such beauty, you understand! That makes it more dangerous. _Ja, ja, Liebchen--ich komme gleich!_" For there had been a soft call from Euphrosyne, standing on the steps of the hotel, and her fond father hurried away to join her. At the same moment, the porter emerged, bearing a bundle of letters and newspapers which had just arrived. Eager for his _Times_ Winnington went to meet him, and the man put into his hands what looked like a large post. He carried it off into the shelter of the pines, for the sun was already blazing on the hotel. Two or three letters on county business he ran through first. His own pet project, as County Councillor,--a county school for crippled children, was at last getting on. Foundation stone to be laid in October--good! "But how the deuce can I get hold of some more women to help work it! Scandalous, how few of the right sort there are about! And as for the Asylums Committee, if we really can't legally co-opt women to it, as our clerk says"--he looked again at a letter in his hand--"the law is an ass!--a double-dyed ass. I swear I won't visit those poor things on the women's side again. It's women's work--let them do it. The questions I have to ask are enough to make an old gamp blush. Hallo, what's this?"