saw such little shoes. Has a woman a right to be conspicuous at the extremities? So conspicuous--Frau von Eckthum’s hands also easily become absorbing--that one is unable connectedly to follow the conversation? I doubt it: but she is an attractive lady. There sat Edelgard, straight and seemly, the perfect flower of a stricter type of virtuous German womanhood, her feet properly placed side by side on the grass and clothed, as I knew, in decent wool with the flat-heeled boots of the Christian gentlewoman, and I must say the type--in one’s wife, that is--is preferable. I rather wondered whether Flitz noticed the contrast between the two ladies. I glanced at him, but his face was as usual a complete blank. I wondered whether he could or could not make his sister sit up if he had wished to; and for the hundredth time I felt I never could really like the man, for from the point of view of a brother one’s sister should certainly sit up. She is, however, an attractive lady: alas that her stockings should be so persistently thin. “England,” I heard Edelgard saying, “is not, I think, a suitable place.” It was then that I consciously noticed that Frau von Eckthum had said “Come.” “Why not?” she asked; and her simple way of asking questions, or answering them with others of her own without waiting to adorn them or round them off with the title of the person addressed, has helped, I know, to make her unpopular in Storchwerder society. “I have heard,” said Edelgard cautiously, no doubt bearing in mind that to hosts whose sister had married an Englishman and was still living with him one would not say all one would like to about it, “I have heard that it is not a place to go to if the object is scenery.” “Oh?” said Frau von Eckthum. Then she added--intelligently, I thought--“But there always is scenery.” “Edelgard means lofty scenery,” said I gently, for we were both holding cups of the Eckthum tea (this was the only house in which we were made to drink tea instead of our aromatic and far more filling national beverage) in our hands, and I have always held one ought to humour the persons whose hospitality one happens to be enjoying--“Or enduring,” said Edelgard cleverly when, on our way home, I mentioned this to her. “Or enduring,” I agreed after a slight pause, forced on reflection to see that it is not true hospitality to oblige your visitors to go without their coffee by employing the unworthy and barbarically simple expedient of not allowing it to appear. But of course that was Flitz. He behaves, I think, much too much as though the place belonged to him.