Frau von Eckthum, however, smiled and shook her head, and very luckily the sick fledgling, so it appeared, still turned with loathing from all nourishment. Lord Sigismund was following us round with the potato _puree_, and in return for being waited on in this manner, a manner that can only be described as hand and foot, Edelgard deigned to give us cups of coffee through her window and Mrs. Menzies-Legh slices of buttered bread through hers. Perhaps my friends will have noted the curious insistence and patience with which we drank coffee. I can hear them say, “Why this continuous coffee?” I can hear them also inquire, “Where was the wine, then, that beverage for gentlemen, or the beer, that beverage for the man of muscle and marrow?” The answer to that is, Nowhere. None of them drank anything more convivial than water or that strange liquid, seemingly so alert and full of promise, ginger-beer, and to drink alone was not quite what I cared for. There was Frau von Eckthum, for instance, looking on, and she had very early in the tour expressed surprise that anybody should ever want to drink what she called intoxicants. “My dear lady,” I had protested--tenderly, though--“you would not have a man drink milk?” “Why not?” said she; but even when she is stupid she does not for an instant cease to be attractive. On the march I often could make up for abstinences in between by going inside the inns outside which the gritless others lunched on bananas and milk, and privately drinking an honest mug of beer. You, my friends, will naturally inquire, “Why privately?” Well, I was in the minority, a position that tends to take the kick, at least the open kick, out of a man--in fact, since my wife’s desertion I occupied the entire minority all by myself; then I am a considerate man, and do not like to go against the grain (other people’s grain), remembering how much I feel it when other people go against mine; and finally (and this you will not understand, for I know you do not like her), there was always Frau von Eckthum looking on. CHAPTER XI That night the rain changed its character, threw off the pretence of being only a mist, and poured in loud cracking drops on to the roof of the caravan. It made such a noise that it actually woke me, and lighting a match I discovered that it was three o’clock and that why I had had an unpleasant dream--I thought I was having a bath--was that the wet was coming through the boarding and descending in slow and regular splashings on my head.