do it by example. They do not attend to words. I have bought a few acres and experiment before their eyes. Our soil is the worst in Germany. It is inconceivably thankless. And the peasants resemble it."
"Oh, really," said Ingeborg.
"The result of the combination is poverty."
"So then, I suppose," said Ingeborg, with memories of the Bishop's methods, "you preach patience."
"Patience! I preach manure."
Again at the dreadful word the ladies leapt.
"It is," he said solemnly, his eyes glistening with enthusiasm, "the foundation of a nation's greatness."
"I hadn't thought of it like that," said Ingeborg, seeing that he waited.
"But on what then does a State depend in the last resort?"
She was afraid to say, for there seemed to be so many possible answers.
"Naturally on its agriculture," said the pastor, with the slight irritation of one obliged to linger over the obvious.
"Of course," said the pliable Ingeborg, trained in acquiescence.
"And on what does agriculture depend in the last resort?"
Brilliantly she hazarded "Manure."
For the third time the ladies leapt, and the one next to her drew away her dress.
He showed his appreciation of her intelligence by nodding slowly.
"A nation must be fed," he said, "and empty fields will feed no one."
"Of course not," said Ingeborg.
"So that it is the chief element in all progress; for the root of progress flourishes only in a filled stomach."
The ladies began to fan themselves violently, nervously, one with The Daily Mirror the other with Answers.
"Of course," said Ingeborg.
"First," said the German gentleman, "you fill your stomach—"
The lady next to Ingeborg made a sudden lunge across her at the strap.
"Excuse me, but do you mind putting that window down?" she said in a sort of burst.
The German gentleman, stemmed in his speech, used the interval while Ingeborg opened the window in buttoning up his overcoat again with care and patience and readjusting his muffler.
When he had attended to these things he resumed his enthusiasm; he seemed to switch it on again.
"The infinite combinations of it!" he exclaimed. "Its infinite varieties! Kali, Kainit, Chilisaltpetre, Superphosphates"—he rolled out the words as though they were the verse of a psalm. "When I shut the door on myself in the little laboratory I have constructed I shut in with me all life, all science, every possibility. I analyse, I synthesize, I separate, reduce, combine. I touch the stars. I stir the depths. The daily world is forgotten. I forget, indeed, everything, except my research. And invariably at the most profound, the most exalted moments some one knocks and tells me it is Sunday again, and will I come out and preach."
He looked at her indignantly, demanding sympathy. "Preach!" he repeated.
"Then why," she asked, with the courage of curiosity, "are you a pastor?"
"Because my father made me one."
"But why are you still one?"
"Because a man must live."
"He oughtn't to want to," said Ingeborg with a faint flush, for she had been carefully trained to shyness when it came to pronouncing opinions—the Bishop called it being womanly—"he oughtn't to want to at the cost of his convictions."
"Nevertheless," said the pastor, "he does."
"Yes," said Ingeborg, obliged to admit it; even at Redchester cases were not unknown. "He does," she said, nodding. "Of course he does." And unable not to be at least as honest as the pastor she added: "And so does a woman."
"Naturally," said the pastor.
She looked at him a moment, and then said impulsively, pulling herself a little forward towards him by the window strap—
"This woman does. She's doing it now."
The two ladies exchanged glances and fluttered their fans faster.
"Which woman?" inquired the pastor, whose mastery of English, though ripe, was not nimble.
"This one," said Ingeborg, pointing at herself. "Me. I'm living at this very moment—I'm whirling along in this train—I'm running away for this holiday entirely at the cost of my convictions."
CHAPTER III
After this it was not to be expected that Dent's Tour should look favourably on either Ingeborg or the German gentleman. Running away? And something happened at Dover that clinched it in its coldness.
The train had slowed down, and the excursionists had become busy and were all standing up expectant and swaying with their bags and umbrellas ready in their hands, except Ingeborg and the pastor. The train stopped, and still the two at the door did not move. They were so much interested in what they were saying that they went on sitting there, barbarously corking up the congested queue inside the carriage while streams of properly liberated passengers poured past the window on their way to the best places on the boat.
The queue heaved and waited, holding on to its good manners till the last possible moment, quite anxious, with the exception of the two ladies who were driven to the very verge of naturalness by the things they had had to listen to, lest it should be forced to show what it was feeling (for what one is feeling, Dent's excursionists had surprisingly discovered, is always somehow something rude), and seconds passed and still it was kept there heaving.
Then the pastor, gazing with a large unhurried interest at the people pushing by the window, people disfigured by haste and the greed for the best places on the boat, said in a voice of mild but penetrating complaint—it almost seemed as if in that congested moment he saw only leisure for musing aloud—"But why does the good God make so many ugly old women?"
It was when he said this that the mountainous lady at the head of the queue flung behaviour to the winds and let herself go uncontrolledly. "Will you allow me to pass?" she cried. Nor did she give him another instant's grace, but pressed between his and Ingeborg's knees, followed torrentially by the released remainder.
"To keep us all waiting there just while he blasphemed!" she panted on the platform to her friend.
And during the rest of the time the party was together it retired, led by these two ladies, into an icy exclusiveness, outside which and left together all day long Ingeborg and the pastor could not but make friends.
They did. They talked and they walked, they climbed and they sight-saw. They did everything Dent had arranged, going with him but not of him, always, as it were, bringing up his rear. Equally careful, being equally poor, they avoided the extras which seemed to lurk beckoning at every corner of the day. Their frugality was flagrant, and shocked the other excursionists even more than the dreadful things they said. "Such bad taste." the Tour declared when,
