ing down on a little
wooden bench. 'You see, at Cambridge, I went on the river a great deal--
I canoed and sculled: and then, besides, I've done a lot of bicycling.'

'What a splendid birthright it is,' he cried, 'to be a wholesome
athletic English girl! You can't think how one admires English girls
after living a year or two in Italy--where women are dolls, except for a
brief period of intrigue, before they settle down to be contented frumps
with an outline like a barrel.'

'A little muscle and a little mind are no doubt advisable adjuncts for a
housewife,' I admitted.

'You shall not say that word,' he cried, seating himself at my side. 'It
is a word for Germans, "housewife." Our English ideal is something
immeasurably higher and better. A companion, a complement! Do you know,
Miss Cayley, it always sickens me when I hear German students
sentimentalising over their _maedchen_: their beautiful, pure, insipid,
yellow-haired, blue-eyed _maedchen_; her, so fair, so innocent, so
unapproachably vacuous--so like a wax doll--and then think of how they
design her in days to come to cook sausages for their dinner, and knit
them endless stockings through a placid middle age, till the needles
drop from her paralysed fingers, and she retires into frilled caps and
Teutonic senility.'

'You seem to have almost as low an opinion of foreigners as your
respected aunt!' I exclaimed, looking quizzically at him.

He drew back, surprised. 'Oh, no; I'm not narrow-minded, like my aunt, I
hope,' he answered. 'I am a good cosmopolitan. I allow Continental
nations all their own good points, and each has many. But their women,
Miss Cayley--and their point of view of their women--you will admit that
there they can't hold a candle to English women.'

I drew a circle in the dust with the tip of my parasol.

'On that issue, I may not be a wholly unprejudiced observer,' I
answered. 'The fact of my being myself an Englishwoman may possibly to
some extent influence my judgment.'

'You are sarcastic,' he cried, drawing away.

'Not at all,' I answered, making a wider circle. 'I spoke a simple fact.
But what is _your_ ideal, then, as opposed to the German one?'

He gazed at me and hesitated. His lips half parted. 'My ideal?' he said,
after a pause. 'Well, _my_ ideal--do you happen to have such a thing as
a pocket-mirror about you?'

I laughed in spite of myself. 'Now, Mr. Tillington,' I said severely,
'if you're going to pay compliments, I sh