acken, silvery in the afternoon light, where
fallow deer examine you for one brief moment of curiosity before they
spring away, panic-stricken, into the deeper shadows of the beeches. In
that sun-flecked place, so exquisite whichever way I looked, so
spacious, and so quiet, how could I be seriously interested in stuffy
indoor questions such as the equality of the sexes, in anything but the
beauty of the world and the joy of living in it? I was not seriously
interested; I doubt if I have ever been. Destiny having decided that I
shall walk through life petticoated, weighed down by the entire range of
disabilities connected with German petticoats, I will waste no time
arguing. There it is, the inexorable fact, and there it will remain; and
one gets used to the disabilities, and finds, on looking at them closer,
that they exclude nothing that is really worth having.

I glanced at the dozing Charlotte, half inclined to wake her up to tell
her this, and exhort her to do as the dragons in the glorious verse of
Doctor Watts, who

Changed their fierce hissings into joyful songs.
And praised their Maker with their forked tongues.

But I was afraid to stir her up lest her tongue should be too forked and
split my arguments to pieces. So she dozed on undisturbed, and I enjoyed
myself in silence, repeating gems from the pages of the immortal doctor,
echoes of the days when I lisped in numbers that were not only infant
but English at the knee of a pious nurse from the land of fogs.

At five o'clock, when I felt that a gentle shaking of Charlotte was no
longer avoidable if we were to reach Binz that evening, and was
preparing to apply it with cousinly gingerliness, an obliging bumble-bee
who had been swinging deliciously for some minutes past in the purple
flower of a foxglove on the very edge of the cliff, backed out of it and
blundered so near Charlotte's face that he brushed it with his wings.
Charlotte instantly sat up, opened her eyes, and stared hard at me. Such
is the suspiciousness of cousins that though I was lying half a dozen
yards away she was manifestly of opinion that I had tickled her. This
annoyed me, for Charlotte was the last person in the world I would think
of tickling. There was something about her that would make it
impossible, however sportively disposed I might be; and besides, you
must be very great friends before you begin to tickle. Charlotte and I
were cousins, but we were as yet nowhere near be