ed by the cares of the house and the babies,
but rather go his daily round of business or pleasure precisely as he
did before he had his house and his babies? I love to have the details
of life arranged with fastidious justice, all its little burdens
distributed with an exact fairness among those who have to carry them;
and I imagine that this being, who should be rather more than man and
less than god, who should understand everything and care nothing, would
call it wrong to allot a double weight to the strong merely because he
is strong, and would call it right that he should have his exact share,
and use the strength he has left over not in carrying the burden of some
weak friend who, burdenless, is still of no account in life, but in
praising God, going first, and showing the others the way.

Thus did I meditate, walking in silence by Charlotte's side in the beech
forest of Sellin. Not for anything would I have put my meditations into
words, well aware that though they might be nourishing to me they would
poison Charlotte. The maiden aunt and the dinner together had given
Charlotte a headache, which I respected by keeping silent; and for two
hours we wandered and sat about among the beeches, sometimes on the
grassy edge of the cliffs, our backs against tree trunks, looking out
over the brilliant blue water with its brilliant green shallows, or
lying in the grass watching the fine weather clouds floating past
between the shining beech-leaves.

Those were glorious hours, for Charlotte dozed most of the time, and it
was almost as quiet as though she had not been there at all. No
bath-guests parted the branches to stare at us; they were sleeping till
the cool of the day. No pedestrians with field-glasses came to look at
the view and ask each other, with one attentive eye on us, if it were
not colossal. No warm students walked along wiping their foreheads as
they sang of love and beer. Nothing that had dined at a _table d'hote_
could possibly move in such heat.

And so it came about that Charlotte and I shared the forest only with
birds and squirrels.

This forest is extremely beautiful. It stretches for miles along the
coast, and is full of paths and roads that lead you to unexpected
lovelinesses--sudden glimpses of the sea between huge beech trunks on
grassy plateaus; deep ravines, their sides clothed with moss, with water
trickling down over green stones to the sea out in the sun at the
bottom; silent glades of br