may call it a thirsty craving to have him inflating me, puffing the deep
unillumined treasure-pits of my nature with laborious hints, as mines are
filled with air to keep the miners going. While he talked he made these
inmost recesses habitable. But the pain lay in my having now and then to
utter replies. The task of speaking was hateful. I found a sweetness in
brooding unrealizingly over hopes and dreams and possibilities, and I let
him go gladly that I might enjoy a week of silence, just taking
impressions as they came, like the sands in the ebb-tide. The impression
of the morning was always enough for a day's meditation. The green
colour and the crimson athwart it, and higher up the pinky lights,
flamingo feathers, on a warm half-circle of heaven, in hue between
amethyst and milky opal; then the rim of the sun's disc not yet severe;
and then the monstrous shadow of tall Schwartz darting at me along the
sand, then the princess. This picture, seen at sunrise, lasted till I
slept. It stirred no thoughts, conjured no images, it possessed me. In
the afternoon the margravine accompanied the princess to a point facing
seaward, within hearing of the military band. She did me the favour to
tell me that she tolerated me until I should become efficient in German
to amuse her, but the dulness of the Belgian city compared with her
lively German watering-places compelled her to try my powers of fun in
French, and in French I had to do duty, and failed in my office.

'Do you know,' said she, 'that your honourable papa is one in a million?
He has the life of a regiment in his ten fingers. What astonishes me is
that he does not make fury in that England of yours--that Lapland! Je ne
puffs me passer de cet homme! He offends me, he trifles, he outrages, he
dares permit himself to be indignant. Bon! we part, and absence pleads
for him with the eloquence of Satan. I am his victim. Does he, then,
produce no stir whatever in your England? But what a people! But yes,
you resemble us, as bottles--bottles; seulement, you are emptied of your