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at, but he would not impart wisdom; and the longer he patted the more perfect did his serenity seem to become. When people approached us and showed a tendency to hang on the great man's lips, he looked up with a happy smile and said, 'This is my little cousin--we have much to say to each other,' and turned his back on them. And when I was asked whether I had not spent a memorable, an elevating evening, being talked to so much by the famous Nieberlein, I could only put on a solemn face and say that I should not soon forget it. 'It will be something to tell your children of, in the days to come when he is a splendid memory,' said the enthusiast. 'Oh won't it!' I ejaculated, with the turned-up eyes of rapture. 'Tell me one thing,' I said to Charlotte as we walked slowly along the sands towards the cliff and the beechwood; 'why, since you took me for a stranger, were you so--well, so gracious to me in the water?' Gertrud had gone back to the hotel laden with both our bathing-things. 'She may as well take mine up at the same time,' Charlotte had remarked, piling them on Gertrud's passive arms. Undeniably she might; and accordingly she did. But her face was wry, and so had been the smile with which she returned Charlotte's careless greetings. 'You still keep that old fool, I see,' said Charlotte. 'It would send me mad to have a person of inferior intellect for ever fussing round me.' 'It would send me much madder to have a person of superior intellect buttoning my boots and scorning me while she does it,' I replied. 'Why was I so gracious to you in the water?' repeated Charlotte in answer to my inquiry, made not without anxiousness, for one likes to know one's own cousin above the practices of ordinary bath-guests. 'I'll tell you why. I detest the stiff, icy way women have of turning their backs if they don't know each other.' 'Oh they're not very stiff,' I remarked, thinking of past bathing experiences, 'and besides, in the water----' 'It is not only unkind, it is simply wicked. For how shall we ever be anything but tools and drudges if we don't co-operate, if we don't stand shoulder to shoulder? Oh my heart goes out to all women! I never see one without feeling I must do all in my power to get to know her, to help her, to show her what she must do, so that when her youth is gone there will still be something left, a so much nobler happiness, a so much truer joy.' 'Than what?' I asked, puzzled. Charlotte w
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