be with me," I said, moved to forwardness by being
full of forest air, which goes to my head.

I suppose this was what they call disrespectful without being funny,
for Frau Bornsted looked at me in silence, and Herr Bornsted, who
doesn't understand English, asked in German, seeing his wife solemn,
"What does she say?" And when she told him he said, "_Ach_," and
showed his disapproval by absorbing himself in the _Deutsche
Tageszeitzing_.

It's wonderful how easy it is to be disrespectful in Germany. You've
only got to be the least bit cheerful and let some of it out, and
you've done it.

"Why are the English always so like that?" Frau Bornsted asked
presently, after having marked her regret at my behaviour by not saying
anything for five minutes.

"Like what?"

"So--so without reverence. And yet you are a religious people. You
send out missionaries."

"Yes, and support bishops," I said. "You haven't got any bishops."

"You are the first nation in the world as regards missionaries," she
said, gazing at me thoughtfully and taking no notice of the bishops.
"My father"--her father is a pastor--"has a great admiration for your
missionaries. How is it you have so many missionaries and at the same
time so little reverence ?"

"Perhaps that _is_ why," I said; and started off explaining, while she
looked at me with beautiful uncomprehending eyes, that the reaction
from the missionaries and from the kind of spirit that prompts their
raising and export might conceivably produce a desire to be irreverent
and laugh, and that life more and more seemed to me like a pendulum,
and that it needs must swing both ways.

Frau Bornsted sat twisting her wedding ring on her finger till I was
quiet again. She does this whenever I emit anything that can be called
an idea. It reminds her that she is married, and that I, as she says,
am _nur ein junges Madchen_, and therefore not to be taken seriously.

When I had finished about the pendulum, she said, "All this will be
cured when you have a husband."

There was a tea party here yesterday afternoon. At least, it was
coffee. I thought there were no neighbours, and when I came back late
from having been all day in the forest, missing with an indifference
that amazed Frau Bornsted the lure of her Sunday dinner, and taking
some plum-cake and two Bibles with me, English and German, because I'm
going to learn German that way among other ways while I'm here, and I
think it's a ve