'I wish you would teach me to dodge what you call the inevitable,' I said.
'As though it wanted any teaching,' said Charlotte stopping short in the middle of the open space before our table to look into my eyes. 'You've only not got to be silly.'
'But what am I to do if I am silly—naturally silly—born it?'
'The tea is getting very cold,' called out Mrs. Harvey-Browne plaintively. She had been watching us with impatience, and seemed perturbed. The moment we got near enough she informed us that the tourists were such that no decent woman could stand it. 'Ambrose has gone off with one of them,' she said,—'a most terrible old man—to look at some view over there. Would you believe it, while we were quietly sitting here not harming anybody, this person came up the hill and immediately began to talk to us as if we knew each other? He actually had the audacity to ask if he might sit with us at this table, as there was no room elsewhere. He was most objectionable. Of course I refused. The most pushing person I have met at all.'
'But there is ample room,' said Charlotte, to whom everything the bishop's wife said and did appeared bad.
'But, my dear Frau Nieberlein, a complete stranger! And such an unpleasantly jocular old man. And I think it so very ill-bred to be jocular in the wrong places.'
'I always think it a pity to cold-shoulder people,' said Charlotte sternly. She was not, it seemed, going to stand any nonsense from the bishop's wife.
'You must be dying for some tea,' I interposed, pouring it out as one who should pour oil on troubled waters.
'And you should consider,' continued Charlotte, 'that in fifty years we shall all be dead, and our opportunities for being kind will be over.'
'My dear Frau Nieberlein!' ejaculated the astonished bishop's wife.