I could hardly believe it when I thought how at that hour of the day before I was lying beneath the hop-poles of Frogs’ Hole Farm with the greater part, as I supposed, of the tour before me; I could hardly believe that here we were again, Edelgard and I, _tête-à-tête_ in a railway carriage and with a future of, if I may coin a word, _tête-à-têteness_ stretching uninterruptedly ahead as far as imagination could be induced to look. And not only just ordinary _tête-à-têteness_, but with the complication of one of the _têtes_, so to speak, being rankly rebellious and unwifely. How long would it take, I wondered, glancing at her as she sat in the corner opposite me, to bring her back to the reason in which she used before we came to England to take delight? I glanced at her, and I found she was looking at me; and immediately on catching my eye she leaned forward and said: “Otto, what was it you did?” They were the first words she had spoken to me that day, and very naturally failing to see any point in them I requested her not to be subtle, which is courteous for senseless. “Why,” said she, not heeding this warning, “did the party break up? What was it you did?” Were there ever such questions? But I recollected she could not dream how things really were, and therefore was not as much put out as I would otherwise have been at the characteristically wifely fashion of at once when anything seemed to be going wrong attributing it to her husband. I therefore good-humouredly applied the Aunt Bockhügel remedy to her, and was willing to leave it at that if she had let me. She, however, preferred to quarrel. Without the least attempt to change the Bockhügel face she said, “My dear Otto--poor Aunt Bockhügel. Won’t we leave her in peace? But tell me what it was you _did_.” Then I became vexed, for really the assumption of superiority, of the right to criticize and blame, went further than a reasonable man can permit. What I said as we journeyed up to London I will not here repeat; it has been said before and will be said often enough again so long as husbands have to have wives: but how about the responsibility resting on the wives? I remembered the cheerful mood I had been in on getting up, and felt no small degree of resentment at the manner in which my wife was trying to wipe it out. Give me a chance, and I am the kindest of men; take away my chance, and what can I do?