nd roughness of the
water; and the water that day looked cold and was certainly rough, and I
felt that there being only two of us in it it would be impossible to
escape the advances of the other one. Still, as the cells were shut at
five, I could not wait till she had done, so I went down and began to
undress.

While I was doing it I heard her leave her cell and anxiously ask the
woman if the sea were very cold. Then she apparently put in one foot,
for I heard her shriek. Then she apparently bent down, and scooping up
water in her hand splashed her face with it, for I heard her gasp. Then
she tried the other foot, and shrieked again. And then the bathing
woman, fearful lest five o'clock should still find her on duty, began
mellifluously to persuade. By this time I was ready, but I did not
choose to meet the unknown emotional one on the plank bridge because the
garments in which one bathes in German waters are regrettably scanty; so
I waited, peeping through the little window. After much talk the
eloquence of the bathing woman had its effect, and the bather with one
wild scream leapt into the foam, which immediately engulfed her, and
when she emerged the first thing she did on getting her breath was to
clutch hold of the rope and shriek without stopping for at least a
minute. 'Unwuerdiges Benehmen,' I observed to Gertrud with a shrug. 'It
must be very cold,' I added to myself, not without a secret shrinking.
But to my surprise, when I ran along the planks above where the
unfortunate clutched and shrieked, she looked up at me with a wet but
beaming countenance, and interrupted her shrieks to gasp out,
'_Prachtvoll!_'

'Really these bath-guests in the water----' I thought indignantly. What
right had this one, only because my apparel was scanty, to smile at me
and say _prachtvoll_? I was so much startled by the unexpected
exclamation from a person who had the minute before been rending the air
with her laments, that my foot slipped on the wet planks, I just heard
the bathing woman advising me to take care, just had time to comment to
myself on the foolishness of such advice to one already hurling through
space, and then came a shock of all-engulfing coldness and wetness and
suffocation, and the next moment there I was gasping and spluttering
exactly as the other bath-guest had gasped and spluttered, but with this
difference, that she had clutched the rope and shrieked, and I, with all
the convulsive energy of panic, was s