"What human being of any intelligence--and I am intelligent," she added, quietly,--"ever confessed to being 'satisfied'? Our shoe pinched us. We have eased it a good deal." "You really find it substantially better to walk with?" "Through this uncomfortable world? Certainly. Why not?" He was silent a little. Then he said, with his pleasant look, throwing his head back to observe her, as though aware he might rouse her antagonism. "All that seems to me to go such a little way." "I daresay," she said, indifferently, though it seemed to him that she flushed. "You men have had everything you want for so long, you have lost the sense of value. Now that we want some of your rights, it is your cue to belittle them. And England, of course, is hopelessly behind!" The tone had sharpened. He laughed again and was about to reply when the band struck up Brahm's Hungarian dances, and talk was hopeless. When the music was over, and the burst of clapping, from all the young folk especially, had died away, the Swedish lady said abruptly-- "But we had an English lady here last year--quite a young girl--very handsome too--who was an even stronger feminist than I." "Oh, yes, we can produce them--in great numbers. You have only to look at our newspapers." His companion's upper lip mocked at the remark. "You don't produce them in great numbers--like the young lady I speak of." "Ah, she was good-looking?" laughed Winnington. "That, of course, gave her a most unfair advantage." "A man's jest," said the other dryly--"and an old one. But naturally women take all the advantage they can get--out of anything. They need it. However, this young lady had plenty of other gifts--besides her beauty. She was as strong as most men. She rode, she climbed, she sang. The whole hotel did nothing but watch her. She was the centre of everything. But after a little while she insisted on leaving her father down here to over-eat himself and play cards, while she went with her maid and a black mare that nobody but she wanted to ride, up to the _Jagd-huette_ in the forest. There!--you can see a little blue smoke coming from it now"-- She pointed through the window to the great forest-clothed cliff, some five thousand feet high, which fronted the hotel; and across a deep valley, just below its topmost point, Mark Winnington saw a puff of smoke mounting into the clear sky. --"Of course there was a great deal of talk. The men gossipped and the women scoffed. Her father, who adored her and could not control her in the least, shrugged his shoulders, played bridge all day long with an English family, and would sit on the verandah watching the path--that path there--which comes down from the _Jagd-huette_ with a spy-glass. Sometimes she would send him down a letter by one of the Jager's boys, and he would send a reply. And every now and then she would come down--riding--like a Brunhilde, with her hair all blown about her--and her eyes--_Ach_, superb!"