Well, I was often glad at this time that my poor Marie-Luise was spared her silver wedding journey, and that a more robust and far less deserving wife went through it in her stead. Marie-Luise was a most wifely wife, with no whalebone (if I may so express it) either about her clothes or her character. All was soft, womanly, overflowing. Touch her, and you left a dimple. Bring your pressure, even the slightest, to bear anywhere on her mind, and it immediately gave way. “But do you _like_ that sort of thing?” asked Mrs. Menzies-Legh, to whom, as we plodded along that day, I was talking in this reminiscent strain for want of a better companion. Ahead walked Edelgard, visibly slimmer, younger, moving quickly and easily in her short skirt and new activity. It was this figure--hardly now at a distance to be distinguished from the figures of the scanty sisters--walking before me that made me think with tenderness of Marie-Luise. Edelgard was behaving badly, and when I told her so at night in our caravan she did not answer. At home she used to express immediate penitence; here she either said nothing, or said short things that reminded me of Mrs. Menzies-Legh, little odd sentences quite unlike her usual style and annoyingly difficult to reply to. And the more she behaved in this manner the more did my thoughts go back regretfully to my gentle and yielding first wife. Sometimes, I recollect, those twenty years with her had seemed long; but that was because, firstly, twenty years are long, and secondly, because we are none of us perfect, and thirdly, because a wife, unless she is careful, is apt to get on to one’s nerves. But how preferable is gentleness to an aggressive activity of mind and body. How annoying to see one’s wife striding on ahead with an ease I could not imitate and therefore in itself a slight on her husband. A man wants a wife who sits still, and not only still but on the same chair every day so that he knows where to find her should he happen to want anything. Marie-Luise was a very calm sitter; she never moved, except to follow the then Clothilde about. Only her hands moved, in a tireless guiding of the needle through those of my under-garments which had become defective. “But do you _like_ that sort of thing?” asked Mrs. Menzies-Legh, unsympathetic as usual. Her gentle sister would have coo’d an interested Oh? and I would have felt soothed and understood. “Like what?” I asked rather peevishly, for it occurred to me at that moment as I watched the figures in front--my wife and Jellaby and Frau von Eckthum--that I had not had a word with the latter since the walk back from church more than twenty-four hours previously, and that her sister, on the other hand, seemed never to leave my side. “Calm sitters,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, “and dimples all over one’s mind wherever you touch it. I suppose when you used to remove the pressure they slowly filled out again. It rather makes one think of india-rubber, doesn’t it?”