The estates round Storchwerder are big and we found on counting up that five calls would cover the entire circle of our country acquaintance. There might have been a sixth, but for reasons with which I entirely concurred my dear wife did not choose to include it. Lines have to be drawn, and I do not think an altogether bad definition of a gentleman or a lady would be one who draws them. Indeed, Edelgard was in some doubt as to whether there should be even five, a member of the five (not in this case actually the land-owner but the brother of the widowed lady owning it, who lives with her and looks after her interests) being a person we neither of us can care much about, because he is not only unsound politically, with a decided leaning disgraceful in a man of his birth and which he hardly takes any trouble to hide toward those views the middle classes and Socialist sort of people call (God save the mark!) enlightened, but he is also either unable or unwilling—Edelgard and I could never make up our minds which—to keep his sister in order. Yet to keep the woman one is responsible for in order whether she be sister, or wife, or mother, or daughter, or even under certain favourable conditions aunt (a difficult race sometimes, as may be seen by the case of Edelgard’s Aunt Bockhügel, of whom perhaps more later) is really quite easy. It is only a question of beginning in time, as you mean to go on in fact, and of being especially firm whenever you feel internally least so. It is so easy that I never could understand the difficulty. It is so easy that when my wife at this point brought me my eleven o’clock bread and ham and butter and interrupted me by looking over my shoulder, I smiled up at her, my thoughts still running on this theme, and taking the hand that put down the plate said, “Is it not, dear wife?”
“Is what not?” she asked—rather stupidly I thought, for she had read what I had written to the end; then without giving me time to reply she said, “Are you not going to write the story of our experiences in England after all, Otto?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“To lend round among our relations next winter?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“Then had you not better begin?”
“Dear wife,” said I, “it is what I am doing.”
“Then,” said she, “do not waste time going off the rails.”
And sitting down in the window she resumed her work of enlarging the armholes of my shirts.
This, I may remark, was tartness. Before she went to England she was never tart. However, let me continue.