though probably, I admit, fighting, inwardly, her poor weak battle also;
and none of the three offered an exception to this rule. The first clear
proof of it--which it still gives me a low sort of pleasure to recall--was
my prompt discovery, as we gathered around the tea-board, to eat the
picnic's remains, that our Flora was out of humor with the Baron. It was
plain that the whole day's flood of small experiences had been to her
pretty vanity a Tantalus's cup. She was quick to tell, with an irritation,
which she genuinely tried to conceal, and with scarcely an ounce of words
to a ton of dead-sweet insinuation, what a social failure he had chosen to
be. Evidently he had spent every golden hour of sweet spiritual
opportunity--I speak from her point of view, or, at least, my notion of
it--not in catching and communicating the charm of any scene or incident,
nor in thrilling comparisons of sentiment with anyone, nor in any
impartation of inspiring knowledge, nor in any mirthful exchange of
compliments or gay glances over the salad and sandwiches; but in
constantly poking and plodding through thicket and mire and solitarily
peering and prying on the under sides of leaves and stems and up and down
and all around the bark of every rough-trunked tree.

She made the picture amusing, none the less, and to no one more so than to
the Baron's wife, whose presence among us at the board was as fragrant, so
to speak, as that of a violet among its leaves and sisters. "Ah! Gustaf,"
she said, with a cadenced gravity more taking than mirth, "sat iss a
treat-ment nobody got a right to but me. But tell me, tell se company,
vhat new sings have you found? I know you have not hunt' all se day and
nussing new found."

But the Baron had found nothing new. He told us so with his mouth dripping
and his nose in the trough--his plate I should say. You could hear him
chew across the room. Suddenly, however, he ceased eating and began to