'What a splendid birthright it is,' he cried, 'to be a wholesome athletic English girl! You can't think how one admires English girls after living a year or two in Italy--where women are dolls, except for a brief period of intrigue, before they settle down to be contented frumps with an outline like a barrel.' 'A little muscle and a little mind are no doubt advisable adjuncts for a housewife,' I admitted. 'You shall not say that word,' he cried, seating himself at my side. 'It is a word for Germans, "housewife." Our English ideal is something immeasurably higher and better. A companion, a complement! Do you know, Miss Cayley, it always sickens me when I hear German students sentimentalising over their _maedchen_: their beautiful, pure, insipid, yellow-haired, blue-eyed _maedchen_; her, so fair, so innocent, so unapproachably vacuous--so like a wax doll--and then think of how they design her in days to come to cook sausages for their dinner, and knit them endless stockings through a placid middle age, till the needles drop from her paralysed fingers, and she retires into frilled caps and Teutonic senility.' 'You seem to have almost as low an opinion of foreigners as your respected aunt!' I exclaimed, looking quizzically at him. He drew back, surprised. 'Oh, no; I'm not narrow-minded, like my aunt, I hope,' he answered. 'I am a good cosmopolitan. I allow Continental nations all their own good points, and each has many. But their women, Miss Cayley--and their point of view of their women--you will admit that there they can't hold a candle to English women.' I drew a circle in the dust with the tip of my parasol. 'On that issue, I may not be a wholly unprejudiced observer,' I answered. 'The fact of my being myself an Englishwoman may possibly to some extent influence my judgment.' 'You are sarcastic,' he cried, drawing away. 'Not at all,' I answered, making a wider circle. 'I spoke a simple fact. But what is _your_ ideal, then, as opposed to the German one?' He gazed at me and hesitated. His lips half parted. 'My ideal?' he said, after a pause. 'Well, _my_ ideal--do you happen to have such a thing as a pocket-mirror about you?' I laughed in spite of myself. 'Now, Mr. Tillington,' I said severely, 'if you're going to pay compliments, I shall have to return. If you want to stop here with me, you must remember that I am only Lady Georgina Fawley's temporary lady's-maid. Besides, I didn't mean that. I meant, what is your ideal of a man's right relation to his _maedchen_?' 'Don't say _maedchen_,' he cried, petulantly. 'It sounds as if you thought me one of those sentimental Germans. I hate sentiment.' 'Then, towards the woman of his choice.'