ide women into two classes: those they want to kiss, and
those they want to kick, who are all those they don't want to kiss.
One can be kissed and kicked in lots of ways besides actually, I think,
and I felt as if I had been both on that dreadful platform at Stettin.
So you can imagine how heavenly it was to get into this beautiful
forest, away from all that, into the quiet, the _holiness_. Frau
Bornsted, who learned English at school, told me all the farms,
including hers, are worked by Russians and Poles who are fetched over
every spring in thousands by German overseers. "It is a good
arrangement," she said. "In case of war we would not permit their
departure, and so would our fields continue to be tilled." In case of
war! Always that word on their tongues. Even in this distant corner
of peace.

The Oberforsterei is a low white house with a clearing round it in
which potatoes have been planted, and a meadow at the back going down
to a stream, and a garden in front behind a low paling, full of pinks
and larkspurs and pansies. A pair of antlers is nailed over the door,
proud relic of an enormous stag the Oberforster shot on an unusually
lucky day, and Frau Bornsted was sewing in the porch beneath
honeysuckle when we arrived. It was just like the Germany one had in
one's story books in the schoolroom days. It seemed too good to be
true after the Lutzowstrasse. Frau Bornsted is quite a pretty young
woman, flat rather than slender, tall, with lovely deep blue eyes and
long black eyelashes. She would be very pretty if it occurred to her
that she is pretty, but evidently it doesn't, or else it isn't proper
to be pretty here; I think this is the real explanation of the way her
hair is scraped hack into a little hard knob, and her face shows signs
of being scrubbed every day with the same soap and the same energy she
uses for the kitchen table. She has no children, and isn't, I suppose,
more than twenty five, but she looks as thirty five, or even forty,
looks in England.

I love it all. It is really just like a story book. We had supper out
in the porch, prepared, spread, and fetched by Frau Bornsted, and it
was a milk soup--very nice and funny, and I lapped it up like a thirsty
kitten--and cold meat, and fried potatoes, and curds and whey, and wild
strawberries and cream. They have an active cow who does all the curds
and whey and cream and butter and milk-soup, besides keeping on having
calves without a murm