behind me all
day. I could have wept at the sudden end to the peace and perfect
freedom of my journey. I went to bed, to a clean and pleasant bed that
at another time would have pleased me, strongly of opinion that life was
not worth while. Nor did it comfort me that from my pillow I looked out
at the mysterious dark plain with its roof of stars and its faint red
window in the north-west, because Charlotte had opened the door between
our rooms and every now and then asked me if I were asleep. I lay making
plans for the circumvention of Charlotte, and rejecting them one after
the other as too uncousinly; and when I had made my head ache with the
difficulty of uniting a becoming cousinliness with the cold-bloodedness
necessary for shaking her off, I spent my time feebly deprecating the
superabundance of cousins in the world. Surely there are too many?
Surely almost everybody has more than he can manage comfortably? It must
have been long after midnight that Charlotte, herself very restless,
called out once more to know if I were asleep.

'Yes I am,' I answered; not quite kindly I fear, but indeed it is an
irritating question.

We left Thiessow at ten the next morning under a grey sky, and drove, at
the strong recommendation of the landlord, along the hard sands as far
as a little fishing place called Lobberort, where we struck off to the
left on to the plain again, and so came once more to Philippshagen and
the high road that runs from there to Goehren, Baabe, and Sellin. I took
the landlord's advice willingly, because I did not choose to drive on
that grey morning in my altered circumstances over the plain along which
I had walked so happily only the day before. The landlord, as obliging a
person as his wife was a capable one, had provided a cart with two
long-tailed, raw-boned horses who were to come with us as far as Binz,
my next stopping-place. Gertrud sat next to the driver of this cart
looking grim. Her prospects were gloomy, for the seat was hard, the
driver was dirty, the cart had no springs, and she had had to pack
Charlotte's clothes. She did not approve of the Frau Professor; how
should she? Gertrud read her _Kreuzzeitung_ as regularly as she did her
Bible, and believed it as implicitly; she knew all about the pamphlets,
and only from the _Kreuzzeitung's_ point of view. And then Charlotte
made the mistake clever people sometimes do of too readily supposing
that others are stupid; and it did not need much shre