“Edelgard means lofty scenery,” said I gently, for we were both holding cups of the Eckthum tea (this was the only house in which we were made to drink tea instead of our aromatic and far more filling national beverage) in our hands, and I have always held one ought to humour the persons whose hospitality one happens to be enjoying—“Or enduring,” said Edelgard cleverly when, on our way home, I mentioned this to her.
“Or enduring,” I agreed after a slight pause, forced on reflection to see that it is not true hospitality to oblige your visitors to go without their coffee by employing the unworthy and barbarically simple expedient of not allowing it to appear. But of course that was Flitz. He behaves, I think, much too much as though the place belonged to him.
Flitz, who knows England well, having spent several years there at our Embassy, said it was the most delightful country in the world. The unpatriotic implication contained in this assertion caused Edelgard and myself to exchange glances, and no doubt she was thinking, as I was, that it would be a sad and bad day for Prussia if many of its gentleman had sisters who made misguided marriages with foreigners, the foreign brother-in-law being so often the thin end of that wedge which at its thick one is a denial of our right to regard ourselves as specially raised by Almighty God to occupy the first place among the nations, and a dislike (I have heard with my own ears a man at a meeting express it) an actual dislike—I can only call it hideous—of the glorious cement of blood and iron by means of which we intend to stick there.
“But I was chiefly thinking,” said Frau von Eckthum, her head well back in the cushions and her eyes fixed pensively on the summer clouds sailing over our heads, “of what you were saying about expense.”
“Dear lady,” I said, “I have been told by all who have done it that travelling in England is the most expensive holiday you can take. The hotels are ruinous as well as bad, the meals are uneatable as well as dear, the cabs cost you a fortune, and the inhabitants are rude.”
I spoke with heat, because I was roused (justly) by Flitz’s unpatriotic attitude, but it was a tempered heat owing to the undoubted (Storchwerder cannot deny it) personal attractiveness of our hostess. Why are not all women attractive? What habitual lambs our sex would become if they were.
“Dear Baron,” said she in her pretty, gentle voice, “do come over and see for yourself. I would like, I think, to convert you. Look at this”—she picked up some papers lying on the grass by her chair, and spreading out one showed me a picture—“do you not think it nice? And, if you want to be economical, it only costs fourteen pounds for a whole month.”
The picture she held out to me was one bearing a strong resemblance to the gipsy carts that are continually (and very rightly) being sent somewhere else by our local police; a little less gaudy perhaps, a little squarer and more solid, but undoubtedly a near relation.
“It is a caravan,” said Frau von Eckthum, in answer to the question contained in my eyebrows; and turning the sheet she showed me another picture representing the same vehicle’s inside.
Edelgard got up and looked over my shoulder.