Sedentary natures, on the contrary, are generally characteristic of persons in whom it is wisest not to place much confidence. There is always something ludicrous connected with them, and they are always unfortunate in one way or the other. They are often jealous, conceited, vulgar, pale-faced and dirty, whereas fresh cheeks are always accompanied by a pleasant atmosphere. The three _Just Comb-Manufacturers_ with their miserable follies were all sedentary people; _The Maker of His Fortune_ and Herr Litumlei were provincials, while all the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler sit in absolute idleness in their little workshops; the tailor, in _Feathers make the Bird_, became an extraordinary creature in consequence of the sedentary life which he led; and whenever Keller wishes to draw the character of an insignificant woman, he makes her sit in her room doing nothing, or engaged in some silly occupation, or else running in and out of other people’s houses. The story of poor Regina is the only one of Keller’s stories in which a good and beautiful creature is misunderstood and made to suffer, and there all the principal scenes are enacted in large and gloomy town houses, where the heavy front door serves as a symbol to show the impossibility of escaping out of a bewitched circle into the light of truth and freedom. Regina, who was a true child of the outer air, would never have gone to her ruin if she had been placed in different surroundings. Fresh air is the one condition which Keller takes as the starting-point for his portraits of women, and it is a condition which is quite original in its way, for it is not as decidedly expressed in the writings of any other author, least of all a modern one. His women must have plenty of air, fresh air, air in which they can move their limbs and which penetrates their clothing. His women are not the productions of culture, nor the fruit of education, they do not belong to the species of “clever daughters,” but neither are they idealised country girls, they are not phantoms, and they are not discoveries, they are living human beings whom he has seen and known, they are personified reality like the trees, the meadows, the cows--they are fragments of nature placed in the midst of other fragments of nature. They are not Keller’s ideal of what a woman should be, they are exact descriptions according to his knowledge of what women really are, as it pleased him to write them down for his own amusement during idle evenings when he sat over his wine. It is human nature as the Swiss understand it, human nature personified and at the same time purified, which moves him to describe women whom he has known or whom it would have amused him to know, and he describes them with lively little flourishes here and there.