man had never
taken her seriously. To be strenuous, to hold intense views on questions
that seem to you to burn, and to be treated as an airy nothing, a
charming nothing perhaps, but still a nothing, must be, on the whole,
disconcerting. I do not know that I should call it more than
disconcerting. You need not, after all, let your vision be blocked
entirely by the person with whom you chance to live; however vast his
intellectual bulk may be, you can look round him and see that the stars
and the sky are still there, and you need not run away from him to do
that. If the great Nieberlein had not taken Charlotte sufficiently
seriously, she had manifestly taken him much too seriously. It is better
to laugh at one's Nieberlein than to be angry with him, and it is
infinitely more personally soothing. And presently you find you have
grown old together, and that your Nieberlein has become unaccountably
precious, and that you do not want to laugh at all,--or if you do, it is
a very tender laughter, tender almost to tears.

And then, as we walked on over the wonderful starlit plain in the huge
hush of the brooding night, the air, heavy with dew and the smell of
grass cut that afternoon in distant meadows, so sweet and soft that it
seemed as if it must smooth away every line of midday eagerness from our
tired faces, Charlotte paused; and before I had done praising Providence
for this refreshment, she not yet having paused at all, she began again
in a new key of briskness, and said, 'By the way, I may as well come
with you when you leave this. I have nothing particular to do. I came
down here for a day or two to get away from some English people I was
with at Binz who had rather got on to my nerves. And I have so much to
say to you, and it will be a good opportunity. We can talk all day,
while we are driving.'

Talk all day while we were driving! If Hazlitt saw no wit in talking and
walking, I see less than none in talking and driving. It was this speech
of Charlotte's that set me marvelling anew at the maliciousness of Fate.
Here was I, the most harmless of women, engaged in the most harmless of
little expeditions, asking and wanting nothing but to be left alone; a
person so obscure as to be, one would think, altogether out of the reach
of the blind Fury with the accursed shears; a person with a plan so mild
and humble that I was ashamed of the childishness of the Fate that could
waste its energies spoiling it. Yet before the end