but gentle, and, compared to the Germans, of beautiful manners; and there were a good many officers—­it was altogether the most excited station I’ve seen, I think—­and they stared too, but I’m certain that if I had been in a difficulty and wanted help they would have walked away.  Kloster told me Germans divide women into two classes:  those they want to kiss, and those they want to kick, who are all those they don’t want to kiss.  One can be kissed and kicked in lots of ways besides actually, I think, and I felt as if I had been both on that dreadful platform at Stettin.  So you can imagine how heavenly it was to get into this beautiful forest, away from all that, into the quiet, the holiness.  Frau Bornsted, who learned English at school, told me all the farms, including hers, are worked by Russians and Poles who are fetched over every spring in thousands by German overseers.  “It is a good arrangement,” she said.  “In case of war we would not permit their departure, and so would our fields continue to be tilled.”  In case of war!  Always that word on their tongues.  Even in this distant corner of peace.

The Oberforsterei is a low white house with a clearing round it in which potatoes have been planted, and a meadow at the back going down to a stream, and a garden in front behind a low paling, full of pinks and larkspurs and pansies.  A pair of antlers is nailed over the door, proud relic of an enormous stag the Oberforster shot on an unusually lucky day, and Frau Bornsted was sewing in the porch beneath honeysuckle when we arrived.  It was just like the Germany one had in one’s story books in the schoolroom days.  It seemed too good to be true after the Lutzowstrasse.  Frau Bornsted is quite a pretty young woman, flat rather than slender, tall, with lovely deep blue eyes and long black eyelashes.  She would be very pretty if it occurred to her that she is pretty, but evidently it doesn’t, or else it isn’t proper to be pretty here; I think this is the real explanation of the way her hair is scraped hack into a little hard knob, and her face shows signs of being scrubbed every day with the same soap and the same energy she uses for the kitchen table.  She has no children, and isn’t, I suppose, more than twenty five, but she looks as thirty five, or even forty, looks in England.

I love it all.  It is really just like a story book.  We had supper out in the porch, prepared, spread, and fetched by Frau Bornsted, and it was a milk soup—­very nice and funny, and I lapped it up like a thirsty kitten—­and cold meat, and fried potatoes, and curds and whey, and wild strawberries and cream.  They have an active cow who does all the curds and whey and cream and butter and milk-soup, besides keeping on having calves without a murmur,—­“She is an example,” said Frau Bornsted, who wants to talk English all the time, which will play havoc, I’m afraid, with my wanting to talk German.

She took me to a window and showed me the cow, pasturing, like David, beside still waters.  “And without rebellious thoughts unsuited to her sex,” said Frau Bornsted, turning and looking at me.  She showed what she was thinking of by adding, “I hope you are not a suffragette?”