I was more and more interested by Rachel as the days went on. A man must be stupid who does not know that a woman is happy in his presence, and for two years now and more I had met no one with a very strong personal feeling for me. And quite apart from that, her mind was interesting to me because it was at once so active and so clear and so limited by her English circumstances. She had the prosperous English outlook. She didn't so much see the wide world as get glimpses of it through the of Westminster and of West End and week-end limitations. She wasn't even aware of that greater unprosperous England, already sulking and darkling outside her political world, that greater England which was presently to make its first audible intimations of discontent in that anti-climax to King George's Coronation, the Railway Strike. India for her was the land of people's cousins, Germany and the German Dreadnoughts bulked far larger, and all the tremendous forces of the East were beyond the range of her imagination. I set myself to widen her horizons.  
I told her something of the intention and range of my travels, and something of the views that were growing out of their experiences.
 
I have a clear little picture in my mind of an excursion we made to that huge national Denkmal which rears its head out of the vineyards of Assmannshausen and Rudesheim over against Bingen. We landed at the former place, went up its little funicular to eat our lunch and drink its red wine at the pleasant inn above, and then strolled along through the woods to the monument.
 
The Fürstin fell behind with her escort, a newly arrived medical student from England, a very pleasant youngster named Berwick, who was all too obviously anxious to change places with me. She devised delays, and meanwhile I, as yet of the state of affairs, went on with Rachel to that towering florid monument with its vast gesticulating Germania, which triumphs over the conquered provinces.
 
We fell talking of war and the passions and that lead to war. Rachel's thoughts were strongly colored by those ideas of a natural between Germany and England and of a necessary revenge for France which have for nearly forty years diverted the bulk of European thought and energy to the waste of military preparations. I jarred with an of preconceptions when I and scolded at these assumptions.
 
"Our two great peoples are disputing for the leadership of the world," I said, "and meanwhile the whole world sweeps past us. We're drifting into a quarrelsome backwater."
 
I began to tell of the fermentation and new beginnings that were everywhere perceptible throughout the East, of the vast masses of human ability and energy that were coming into action in China and India, of the future of both North and South America, of the mere accidentalness of the European advantage. "History," I said, "is already shifting the significance out of Western Europe altogether, and we English cannot see it; we can see no further than Berlin, and these Germans can think of nothing better than to the French with such tawdry as this! Europe goes on to-day as India went on in the eighteenth century, making aimless history. And the sands of opportunity run and run...."
 
I my shoulders and we stood for a little while looking dow............