the sheltering jam that makes
the pills of life possible. She is buffer, comforter, and cook. And so
long as she enjoys these various roles the arrangement is perfect. The
difficulties begin when, defying Nature's teaching, which on this point
is luminous, she refuses to be the hedge, flannel, jam, buffer,
comforter, and cook; and when she goes so far on the sulphuric path of
rebellion as to insist on being clever on her own account and publicly,
she has, in Germany at least, set every law of religion and decency at
defiance. Charlotte had been doing this, if all I had heard was true,
for the last three years; therefore her stern inquiry addressed to a
wife of my sobriety struck me as singularly out of place. What had I
been doing with my life? Looking back into it in search of an answer it
seemed very spacious, and sunny, and quiet. There were children in it,
and there was a garden, and a spouse in whose eyes I was precious; but I
had not done anything. And if I could point to no pamphlets or lectures,
neither need I point to a furrow between my eyebrows.

'It is very odd,' Charlotte went on, as I sat silent, 'our meeting like
this. I was on the verge of writing to ask if I might come and stay with
you.'

'Oh were you?'

'So often lately I have thought just you might be such a help to me if
only I could wake you up.'

'Wake me up, my dear Charlotte?'

'Oh, I've heard about you. I know you live stuffed away in the country
in a sort of dream. You needn't try to answer my question about what you
have done. You can't answer it. You have lived in a dream, entirely
wrapped up in your family and your plants.'

'Plants, my dear Charlotte?'

'You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of
your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world
where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer,
where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer
experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your
existence--no one could call it life--is quite negative and unemotional.
It is as negative and as unemotional as----' She paused and looked at me
with a faint, compassionate smile.

'As what?' I asked, anxious to hear the worst.

'Frankly, as an oyster's.'

'Really, my dear Charlotte,' I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very
unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Goehren. Why had I not
stayed there two or three days, as I had