This time the Menzies-Legh couple went to find the owner and crave permission. So reduced were we--and could reduction go further?--that to crave, hat in hand, for permission to occupy some wretched field for a few hours, and to crave it often of illiterate, selfish, and grossly greedy persons like my friend at Dundale, was not beneath any of our prides, while to obtain it seemed the one boon worth having. While they were gone we waited, a melancholy string of vehicles and people in a world made up of mist and mud. Frau von Eckthum, who might have cheered me, had been invisible nearly the whole day, ministering (no doubt angelically) to the afflicted fledgling. Edelgard and the child Jane got into the Elsa during the pause and began to teach each other languages. I leaned against the gate, staring before me. Old James, a figure of dripping patience, remained at his horse’s head. And Lord Sigismund and Jellaby, as though they had not had enough exercise, walked up and down the road talking. Except the sound of their receding and advancing footsteps the stillness was broken by nothing at all. It was a noiseless rain. It did not patter. And yet, fine though it was, it streamed down the flanks of the horses, the sides of the caravans, and actually penetrated, as I later on discovered, through the green arras lining of the Elsa, making a long black streak from roof to floor. I wonder what my friends at home would have said could they have seen me then. No shelter; no refuge; no rest. These three negatives, I take it, sum up fairly accurately a holiday in a caravan. You cannot get in, for if you do either you find it full already of your wife, or, if it is moving, Jellaby immediately springs up from nowhere and inquires at the window whether you have noticed how your horse is sweating. At every camp there is nothing but work--and oh, my friends, such work! Work undreamed of in your ordered lives, and nothing, nothing but it, for must you not eat? And without it there is no eating. And then when you have eaten, without the least pause, the least interval for the meditation so good after meals, there begins that frightful and accursed form of activity, most frightful and accursed of all known forms, the washing up. How it came about that it was not from the first left to the women I cannot understand; they are fitted by nature for such labour, and do not feel it; but I, being in a minority, was powerless to interfere. Nor did I always succeed in evading it. If we camped early, the daylight exposed my movements; and by the time it was done bed seemed the only place to go to. Now an intelligent man does not desire to go to bed at eight; yet in that cold weather--we were, they said, unusually unfortunate in the weather--even if it was dry, what pleasure was there in sitting out-of-doors? I had had enough during the day of out-of-doors; by the time evening came, out-of-doors and fresh air were things abhorrent to me.