Mastertank1
2nd Level Yellow Feather
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The Burgomiester And The Suffragette
A Hysterical Historical by Mastertank1
Starring Crydun of the TMF as Carlotta
Carlotta and Zachary were newlyweds, and that was the problem. If Carlotta were one whit less intelligent, vivacious and charming. If Her fine, voluptuous figure did not excite the lustful envy of every other single man in town and no few of the married ones. Above all, if not for the fact that Zachary was deeply and irretrievably in love with her, Carlotta’s behavior would have caused Zachary to seek to put her aside.
For an ordinary man, it would have been bad enough. But Zachary was the Burgomiester! He had been elected for life to the equivalent of mayor in the substantial, respectable and increasingly prosperous manufacturing town of Hansdorff Am Rhine two years ago, and it had been very necessary that he get married as soon as possible thereafter.
To be elected to an office of such high trust at his young age of just 33 years, and while not yet wed, was extraordinary. To justify that trust, he had to marry and visibly settle down. The electors of the town, the men of property, were well satisfied with his tenure of office so far.
Zachary was a very intelligent man, and clearly saw the wave of the economic future. His policy of accommodating in all ways the capitalists who had money to invest so that they found Hansdorff a most congenial place to make such investments had proven brilliant.
In the past two years, twenty mills and factories of various types had been built in Hansdorff. The largest was a steel mill belonging to the firm of Krupp Von Bohlen Gesellschafft. For the past year, any resident of Hansdorff Am Rhine who wanted to work could find a well paid job, even though the surrounding Palatinate province was severely depressed in this decade of the 1890s.
Zachary was regarded as a young man of power and influence, destined for great things. The prosperity of Hansdorff had begun to spread, pulling the entire province upward along with its rise.
People were flocking to the town for jobs. Housing was being built, alongside the factories. Building firms were also hiring. So were the makers of furniture and various goods for the home, and so were clothiers and tailors. The ripple effect of each new mill or factory generated ten more jobs in the town for each one in the mill.
Despite the dizzy pace of industrialization, Hansdorff was one of the least polluted towns in Europe. Carlotta had prevailed upon Zachary to decree that property along the banks of the three swift flowing streams that fell through the town to enter the Rhine be reserved for mills or factories only, with all structures not requiring direct water power being placed adjacent to the waterfront property.
The result, as Carlotta intended, was that none of the industrial installations in Hansdorff used the dirty, smelly, pollution producing coal fired steam engines. Instead, all the machinery was driven by plentiful water power. Also by law, and also by Carlotta’s insistence, all cooking and home heating was accomplished by burning either clean burning hardwoods or almost as clean burning anthracite or hard coal. Lighting had switched from the burning of animal or vegetable fat to lamps, lanterns and street lights that used clean natural gas, or at worst coal oil.
If an entire week went by with no rain to flush out the streets and sewers, sluice gates, built on the three streams at sites well above the town, would be opened to serve the same cleansing function as the rain. This was also Carlotta’s idea. Because Hansdorff was so remarkably clean, many of the owners of the mills and factories chose to build their homes within or just outside the town.
This added still more to the growing prosperity. The townsmen were so grateful for the wonderful results of Zachary’s policies, the assembly had voted to double his already generous pay, and had passed the measure over his pro forma veto.
Thus far, all was well. Thus far, Carlotta’s ideas had borne highly nourishing fruit, all well and good....BUT! Then there were all of those OTHER ideas of hers! Strange, wild, outlandish ideas! Ideas she would NOT stop expressing in public.
Publicly funded care for those too elderly or disabled to work? Ridiculous! Surely that was a task for private charity. If private charity did not do an adequate job of it, as was clearly the case, that was simply bad luck for the needy. God would provide, or not.
Legal limitations on the hours of work of children? That was a matter between the children’s parents and the employers. Government had no business interfering.
Paying women the same as men for the same work? Preposterous! Everyone ‘knew’ that men were better workers than women. Besides, a man had either a family to feed or the expense of courting to get himself a wife to be met. Women might be presumed (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) to rely in large part on a husband or father for their subsistence.
Worst of all, ‘Women’s Suffrage’. It was to shudder! Insanity! Allow women to vote? My God, the very idea! Try as he could (and did) Zachary simply could change Carlotta’s mind on these subjects. Nor could he persuade her to keep these mad ideas to herself, nor even to confine her expression of them to her loving husband, whose doting affection for her would cause him to make allowances within limits.
It was not bad enough that she said these things where others could hear. Carlotta actually wrote them in letters to the editor, and in articles for magazines. She incorporated them into short stories she had written, and was working on a novel that included many of them. And, she wrote well!
Well enough that her letters to the editor were almost always selected to be printed in the letters columns of the publications she wrote to. Well enough that most of her articles got purchased and published, as did her short stories. There was talk of bringing out a group of her stories in a book called an anthology, and that publisher was interested in seeing her novel when it was done.
It was beginning to hurt Zachary’s public image. It was whispered that the handsome and powerful young Burgomiester could not control his own wife’s runaway mouth. What else, it was snidely asked, can Zachary not control regarding Carlotta’s behavior. His position of power was being subtly undermined. He had to Do Something!
Zachary had already tried every gambit of verbal persuasion he could come up with. He had to try something else. A physically powerful man, Zachary knew he could try beating her, as so many of his male relatives had suggested.
He knew Carlotta, and did not think that would work. Besides, he found that the very idea of striking his beloved with the intent of causing her pain made him sick to his stomach. He loved her. The LAST thing he wanted to do was to beat her! There had to be some other way.
Then he received inspiration. One of his oldest and closest friends sent him a book about a medieval German character named Tobias Hackner. He was said to have tickled his wives; at first ostensibly to discipline them. Then he began letting it become obvious that he was tickling them only because he enjoyed doing so.
It was said that each wife lived in terror of the terrible, lengthy ticklings he gave them. It was also rumored that each of the four had eventually died during an endless and merciless tickle torture.
Zachary had no intention of letting things go that far. But, he knew his dear, headstrong Carlotta was extremely ticklish, and approximately where. He wondered if a semi-severe tickling might induce her not to change or give up her opinions (he knew that was beyond human power to effect) but at least to confine the open expression of them to those times when no one except Zachary was present. Huh! It was surely worth a try.
Zachary found the idea of his Carlotta laughing helplessly as he tickled her oddly arousing. Of course, any thoughts of her could arouse him. After all, she was the finest figure of lusciously full fleshed feminine beauty he had ever seen. Every other man in town envied him his zoftige fraulein, his lovely, curvy woman. If nothing else came of it, it would at least be fun!
On the day that he resolved to try, Zachary arranged for the servants to end their day early, going home to the little servants cottage across the back yard at five in the afternoon. They left dinner in the oven to keep it warm.
When Carlotta arrived home from her suffragist meeting, she was surprised to find Zachary waiting, looking very solemn. He would normally still be working hard in his office at that time of day. He went behind her and, to her amazement, fastened a padded cloth sleeping mask across her eyes, so that she could not see a thing. Zachary led Carlotta into the kitchen, where the table had been meticulously cleared and cleaned.
This table had been in Zachary’s family for many generations. It was nine feet long by four and a half feet wide, crafted from heavy boards and timbers of Black Forest Oak. Hundreds of years of use and meticulous cleaning with rubbing oils had given the wood a deep, soft patina and perfect smoothness.
Zachary came up behind the blindfolded Carlotta and began to tickle the sides of her neck. She at once began giggling. She reached up to bat his hands away but he grasped her wrists, gently but firmly forcing her hands down. Trapping both of her wrists in one powerful hand, he resumed gently tickling her neck with the other.
Carlotta giggled and squirmed. This was not like her normally predictable Zachary, but she was liking it! The tickling made her giggle and wiggle in a most indecorous manner, but there was something about the sensation she found enjoyable. It was certainly turning her on!
Zachary started to nibble Carlotta’s neck with his lips while he tickled. Her giggles grew louder and her wriggles more vehement. Her enjoyment also grew. She was thinking that this was fun, and very sexy.
Suddenly, Zachary stopped. Then, startling Carlotta with a display of strength, he easily lifted her substantial form in his arms, left arm behind her knees while his right arm cradled her upper back. He deposited her gently on the cleared table top.
Draping Carlotta’s arms over the short edge of the table, Zachary pinned them in place by pressing them between the wood and his massively muscled thighs. This was supposed to be punishment, darn it! He started to tickle Carlotta’s ears. Again, she giggled and writhed, but did not seem to be in any great distress. He tried tickling her throat, and under her chin. More happy giggles and wiggles.
They were both having fun, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. Zachary reached down and started to tickle Carlotta’s tummy. She squealed with delight and began, for the first time, to actually laugh instead of just giggle. But she still seemed to be enjoying more than suffering.
He was enjoying it too, that was certain. He loved the expression on her face and the sound of her laughter. The way she moved her voluptuous body as he tickled was extremely sexy and exciting.
Zachary explored Carlotta’s upper body for ticklishness. She was very ticklish under her arms. He really liked the way she laughed and bucked. She was also very ticklish on her ribs, and seemed not to enjoy that so much.
Zachary kept that in mind. After all, this was supposed to be punishment, wasn’t it? At the moment, he was too fascinated by his wife’s intriguing reactions to cease exploring and stay with one place.
After what seemed like a very long time, much longer than the half hour claimed by the wall clock, Zachary paused in the exploratory tickling and took a step back, literally and mentally. Thinking, he walked around to the other end of the table and looked at Carlotta from there.
Carlotta was gasping, with a happy smile on her sweet face, and making no move to remove the blindfold. Interesting. Zachary realized that she must be enjoying this, thinking it just a new game.
Zachary sat on the end of the table, legs astraddle of the wood. He grasped his wife’s legs by the calves, just below her knees, and pulled her towards him. He lifted his legs one by one, pinning each of Carlotta’s shapely ankles securely under a thigh. Then he reached down behind him by and working entirely by feel pulled off her shoes.
Carlotta looked puzzled, until Zachary began to tease her stockinged toes. That was one of her most ticklish places; she laughed harder than she had yet, and she couldn’t stop. Bucking and twisting and squirming and struggling and above all laughing like a madwoman, still making no attempt to remove the blindfold, Carlotta was having more fun than she could ever remember!
And God, was this ever turning her on! Through all the sweet ticklish agony, Carlotta found herself wanting her Zachary more than she ever had before!
Zachary paused for a moment. He reached up under Carlotta’s skirt to find the tops of her stockings and pulled them down to her ankles. Groping awkwardly under his own thighs he pulled the stockings the rest of the way down and off. Carlotta was still gasping deep breaths while happily smiling. Zachary reached back again, and this time he played with Carlotta’s bare toes, with no thick cotton stocking fabric to muffle the sensation.
Carlotta laughed louder and more wildly than ever. She was quite clearly out of control. The thoughts of his original purpose in tickling his wife flew right out of Zachary’s head. At that moment, one single thought filled his mind, leaving room for no other;
“This beautiful, wonderful being, laughing and writhing before him in total abandon, was actually his wife, his Carlotta, and he had the moral right to make love to her, and why the hell wasn’t he already doing exactly that?”
He could tell that Carlotta was just as aroused and eager as he was. Zachary jumped off the table and began frantically removing his own clothing and hers. As soon as Carlotta realized he was stripping her, she began eagerly helping. They then had the wildest, most completely satisfying lovemaking of their entire marriage, right there on the huge kitchen table.
In the afterglow, Zachary removed the blindfold from Carlotta’s eyes, and then kissed her eyelids. He cradles her head on his left upper arm and lay back. With a sigh he said; “Well, that didn’t work.”
Carlotta was puzzled; ‘What do you mean, it didn’t work? That was wonderful! The best! I thought it worked just fine!”
Smiling, he told her; “It was supposed to be a punishment. Tickle torture, something to stop you from embarrassing me by going to those meetings and speaking out in public the way you do.”
Gazing at him in surprise; “Most husbands would have beaten me for that purpose, if they meant to punish me.”
“I would never beat you, liebchen. I love you far too much. I was hoping that the tickling would prove to be a punishment that would control your behavior without hurting you.”
Thoughtfully, Carlotta mused; “Why, it’s true. In all of our marriage, you have never struck me even once!”
“Nor do I ever intend to.”
Looking contrite, Carlotta asked; “Is my advocacy of social change truly such an embarrassment, miene starker, my strong man?”
“I have been told that it’s the only reason I haven’t been raised to the nobility and has barred me from consideration for the post of provincial governor.”
Carlotta now looked stricken; “Really? They take it that seriously? It is actually stopping the advancement of your career?”
Thinking hard, Carlotta said; “Perhaps this experiment with tickling has not been a complete failure, my husband. I will strike a bargain with you. I will attend fewer meetings and speak almost never. I will publish my stories and articles and my novel under a pen name. In return, each time I stay away from a meeting or publish under a secret false name, you will reward me by tickling me and then making love with me this way! Have we an agreement?”
“Must it always take place here on the table?”
Striking his broad chest; “Of course not, you silly thing!”
“Then we have a bargain!”
“Good. Now get up so I can clean the table before setting it for our dinner, which I can smell staying warm in the oven. You have left me a mess to clean up, as you men always do for us women!”
Das Ende
A Hysterical Historical by Mastertank1
Starring Crydun of the TMF as Carlotta
Carlotta and Zachary were newlyweds, and that was the problem. If Carlotta were one whit less intelligent, vivacious and charming. If Her fine, voluptuous figure did not excite the lustful envy of every other single man in town and no few of the married ones. Above all, if not for the fact that Zachary was deeply and irretrievably in love with her, Carlotta’s behavior would have caused Zachary to seek to put her aside.
For an ordinary man, it would have been bad enough. But Zachary was the Burgomiester! He had been elected for life to the equivalent of mayor in the substantial, respectable and increasingly prosperous manufacturing town of Hansdorff Am Rhine two years ago, and it had been very necessary that he get married as soon as possible thereafter.
To be elected to an office of such high trust at his young age of just 33 years, and while not yet wed, was extraordinary. To justify that trust, he had to marry and visibly settle down. The electors of the town, the men of property, were well satisfied with his tenure of office so far.
Zachary was a very intelligent man, and clearly saw the wave of the economic future. His policy of accommodating in all ways the capitalists who had money to invest so that they found Hansdorff a most congenial place to make such investments had proven brilliant.
In the past two years, twenty mills and factories of various types had been built in Hansdorff. The largest was a steel mill belonging to the firm of Krupp Von Bohlen Gesellschafft. For the past year, any resident of Hansdorff Am Rhine who wanted to work could find a well paid job, even though the surrounding Palatinate province was severely depressed in this decade of the 1890s.
Zachary was regarded as a young man of power and influence, destined for great things. The prosperity of Hansdorff had begun to spread, pulling the entire province upward along with its rise.
People were flocking to the town for jobs. Housing was being built, alongside the factories. Building firms were also hiring. So were the makers of furniture and various goods for the home, and so were clothiers and tailors. The ripple effect of each new mill or factory generated ten more jobs in the town for each one in the mill.
Despite the dizzy pace of industrialization, Hansdorff was one of the least polluted towns in Europe. Carlotta had prevailed upon Zachary to decree that property along the banks of the three swift flowing streams that fell through the town to enter the Rhine be reserved for mills or factories only, with all structures not requiring direct water power being placed adjacent to the waterfront property.
The result, as Carlotta intended, was that none of the industrial installations in Hansdorff used the dirty, smelly, pollution producing coal fired steam engines. Instead, all the machinery was driven by plentiful water power. Also by law, and also by Carlotta’s insistence, all cooking and home heating was accomplished by burning either clean burning hardwoods or almost as clean burning anthracite or hard coal. Lighting had switched from the burning of animal or vegetable fat to lamps, lanterns and street lights that used clean natural gas, or at worst coal oil.
If an entire week went by with no rain to flush out the streets and sewers, sluice gates, built on the three streams at sites well above the town, would be opened to serve the same cleansing function as the rain. This was also Carlotta’s idea. Because Hansdorff was so remarkably clean, many of the owners of the mills and factories chose to build their homes within or just outside the town.
This added still more to the growing prosperity. The townsmen were so grateful for the wonderful results of Zachary’s policies, the assembly had voted to double his already generous pay, and had passed the measure over his pro forma veto.
Thus far, all was well. Thus far, Carlotta’s ideas had borne highly nourishing fruit, all well and good....BUT! Then there were all of those OTHER ideas of hers! Strange, wild, outlandish ideas! Ideas she would NOT stop expressing in public.
Publicly funded care for those too elderly or disabled to work? Ridiculous! Surely that was a task for private charity. If private charity did not do an adequate job of it, as was clearly the case, that was simply bad luck for the needy. God would provide, or not.
Legal limitations on the hours of work of children? That was a matter between the children’s parents and the employers. Government had no business interfering.
Paying women the same as men for the same work? Preposterous! Everyone ‘knew’ that men were better workers than women. Besides, a man had either a family to feed or the expense of courting to get himself a wife to be met. Women might be presumed (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) to rely in large part on a husband or father for their subsistence.
Worst of all, ‘Women’s Suffrage’. It was to shudder! Insanity! Allow women to vote? My God, the very idea! Try as he could (and did) Zachary simply could change Carlotta’s mind on these subjects. Nor could he persuade her to keep these mad ideas to herself, nor even to confine her expression of them to her loving husband, whose doting affection for her would cause him to make allowances within limits.
It was not bad enough that she said these things where others could hear. Carlotta actually wrote them in letters to the editor, and in articles for magazines. She incorporated them into short stories she had written, and was working on a novel that included many of them. And, she wrote well!
Well enough that her letters to the editor were almost always selected to be printed in the letters columns of the publications she wrote to. Well enough that most of her articles got purchased and published, as did her short stories. There was talk of bringing out a group of her stories in a book called an anthology, and that publisher was interested in seeing her novel when it was done.
It was beginning to hurt Zachary’s public image. It was whispered that the handsome and powerful young Burgomiester could not control his own wife’s runaway mouth. What else, it was snidely asked, can Zachary not control regarding Carlotta’s behavior. His position of power was being subtly undermined. He had to Do Something!
Zachary had already tried every gambit of verbal persuasion he could come up with. He had to try something else. A physically powerful man, Zachary knew he could try beating her, as so many of his male relatives had suggested.
He knew Carlotta, and did not think that would work. Besides, he found that the very idea of striking his beloved with the intent of causing her pain made him sick to his stomach. He loved her. The LAST thing he wanted to do was to beat her! There had to be some other way.
Then he received inspiration. One of his oldest and closest friends sent him a book about a medieval German character named Tobias Hackner. He was said to have tickled his wives; at first ostensibly to discipline them. Then he began letting it become obvious that he was tickling them only because he enjoyed doing so.
It was said that each wife lived in terror of the terrible, lengthy ticklings he gave them. It was also rumored that each of the four had eventually died during an endless and merciless tickle torture.
Zachary had no intention of letting things go that far. But, he knew his dear, headstrong Carlotta was extremely ticklish, and approximately where. He wondered if a semi-severe tickling might induce her not to change or give up her opinions (he knew that was beyond human power to effect) but at least to confine the open expression of them to those times when no one except Zachary was present. Huh! It was surely worth a try.
Zachary found the idea of his Carlotta laughing helplessly as he tickled her oddly arousing. Of course, any thoughts of her could arouse him. After all, she was the finest figure of lusciously full fleshed feminine beauty he had ever seen. Every other man in town envied him his zoftige fraulein, his lovely, curvy woman. If nothing else came of it, it would at least be fun!
On the day that he resolved to try, Zachary arranged for the servants to end their day early, going home to the little servants cottage across the back yard at five in the afternoon. They left dinner in the oven to keep it warm.
When Carlotta arrived home from her suffragist meeting, she was surprised to find Zachary waiting, looking very solemn. He would normally still be working hard in his office at that time of day. He went behind her and, to her amazement, fastened a padded cloth sleeping mask across her eyes, so that she could not see a thing. Zachary led Carlotta into the kitchen, where the table had been meticulously cleared and cleaned.
This table had been in Zachary’s family for many generations. It was nine feet long by four and a half feet wide, crafted from heavy boards and timbers of Black Forest Oak. Hundreds of years of use and meticulous cleaning with rubbing oils had given the wood a deep, soft patina and perfect smoothness.
Zachary came up behind the blindfolded Carlotta and began to tickle the sides of her neck. She at once began giggling. She reached up to bat his hands away but he grasped her wrists, gently but firmly forcing her hands down. Trapping both of her wrists in one powerful hand, he resumed gently tickling her neck with the other.
Carlotta giggled and squirmed. This was not like her normally predictable Zachary, but she was liking it! The tickling made her giggle and wiggle in a most indecorous manner, but there was something about the sensation she found enjoyable. It was certainly turning her on!
Zachary started to nibble Carlotta’s neck with his lips while he tickled. Her giggles grew louder and her wriggles more vehement. Her enjoyment also grew. She was thinking that this was fun, and very sexy.
Suddenly, Zachary stopped. Then, startling Carlotta with a display of strength, he easily lifted her substantial form in his arms, left arm behind her knees while his right arm cradled her upper back. He deposited her gently on the cleared table top.
Draping Carlotta’s arms over the short edge of the table, Zachary pinned them in place by pressing them between the wood and his massively muscled thighs. This was supposed to be punishment, darn it! He started to tickle Carlotta’s ears. Again, she giggled and writhed, but did not seem to be in any great distress. He tried tickling her throat, and under her chin. More happy giggles and wiggles.
They were both having fun, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. Zachary reached down and started to tickle Carlotta’s tummy. She squealed with delight and began, for the first time, to actually laugh instead of just giggle. But she still seemed to be enjoying more than suffering.
He was enjoying it too, that was certain. He loved the expression on her face and the sound of her laughter. The way she moved her voluptuous body as he tickled was extremely sexy and exciting.
Zachary explored Carlotta’s upper body for ticklishness. She was very ticklish under her arms. He really liked the way she laughed and bucked. She was also very ticklish on her ribs, and seemed not to enjoy that so much.
Zachary kept that in mind. After all, this was supposed to be punishment, wasn’t it? At the moment, he was too fascinated by his wife’s intriguing reactions to cease exploring and stay with one place.
After what seemed like a very long time, much longer than the half hour claimed by the wall clock, Zachary paused in the exploratory tickling and took a step back, literally and mentally. Thinking, he walked around to the other end of the table and looked at Carlotta from there.
Carlotta was gasping, with a happy smile on her sweet face, and making no move to remove the blindfold. Interesting. Zachary realized that she must be enjoying this, thinking it just a new game.
Zachary sat on the end of the table, legs astraddle of the wood. He grasped his wife’s legs by the calves, just below her knees, and pulled her towards him. He lifted his legs one by one, pinning each of Carlotta’s shapely ankles securely under a thigh. Then he reached down behind him by and working entirely by feel pulled off her shoes.
Carlotta looked puzzled, until Zachary began to tease her stockinged toes. That was one of her most ticklish places; she laughed harder than she had yet, and she couldn’t stop. Bucking and twisting and squirming and struggling and above all laughing like a madwoman, still making no attempt to remove the blindfold, Carlotta was having more fun than she could ever remember!
And God, was this ever turning her on! Through all the sweet ticklish agony, Carlotta found herself wanting her Zachary more than she ever had before!
Zachary paused for a moment. He reached up under Carlotta’s skirt to find the tops of her stockings and pulled them down to her ankles. Groping awkwardly under his own thighs he pulled the stockings the rest of the way down and off. Carlotta was still gasping deep breaths while happily smiling. Zachary reached back again, and this time he played with Carlotta’s bare toes, with no thick cotton stocking fabric to muffle the sensation.
Carlotta laughed louder and more wildly than ever. She was quite clearly out of control. The thoughts of his original purpose in tickling his wife flew right out of Zachary’s head. At that moment, one single thought filled his mind, leaving room for no other;
“This beautiful, wonderful being, laughing and writhing before him in total abandon, was actually his wife, his Carlotta, and he had the moral right to make love to her, and why the hell wasn’t he already doing exactly that?”
He could tell that Carlotta was just as aroused and eager as he was. Zachary jumped off the table and began frantically removing his own clothing and hers. As soon as Carlotta realized he was stripping her, she began eagerly helping. They then had the wildest, most completely satisfying lovemaking of their entire marriage, right there on the huge kitchen table.
In the afterglow, Zachary removed the blindfold from Carlotta’s eyes, and then kissed her eyelids. He cradles her head on his left upper arm and lay back. With a sigh he said; “Well, that didn’t work.”
Carlotta was puzzled; ‘What do you mean, it didn’t work? That was wonderful! The best! I thought it worked just fine!”
Smiling, he told her; “It was supposed to be a punishment. Tickle torture, something to stop you from embarrassing me by going to those meetings and speaking out in public the way you do.”
Gazing at him in surprise; “Most husbands would have beaten me for that purpose, if they meant to punish me.”
“I would never beat you, liebchen. I love you far too much. I was hoping that the tickling would prove to be a punishment that would control your behavior without hurting you.”
Thoughtfully, Carlotta mused; “Why, it’s true. In all of our marriage, you have never struck me even once!”
“Nor do I ever intend to.”
Looking contrite, Carlotta asked; “Is my advocacy of social change truly such an embarrassment, miene starker, my strong man?”
“I have been told that it’s the only reason I haven’t been raised to the nobility and has barred me from consideration for the post of provincial governor.”
Carlotta now looked stricken; “Really? They take it that seriously? It is actually stopping the advancement of your career?”
Thinking hard, Carlotta said; “Perhaps this experiment with tickling has not been a complete failure, my husband. I will strike a bargain with you. I will attend fewer meetings and speak almost never. I will publish my stories and articles and my novel under a pen name. In return, each time I stay away from a meeting or publish under a secret false name, you will reward me by tickling me and then making love with me this way! Have we an agreement?”
“Must it always take place here on the table?”
Striking his broad chest; “Of course not, you silly thing!”
“Then we have a bargain!”
“Good. Now get up so I can clean the table before setting it for our dinner, which I can smell staying warm in the oven. You have left me a mess to clean up, as you men always do for us women!”
Das Ende
