FRAU- 
 AND 
 
 T "CTKT 
 
 M?
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 hfUiA-^ )jn^.'f^fh^
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND 
 MR. ANSTRUTHER
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT 
 
 AND 
 
 MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 BEING THE LETTERS 
 OF AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN 
 
 BV THE AUTHOR OF 
 "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN" 
 
 'Ru SS ELL 5 A^/^A / AT /i/^^T7a t i^^o C H^Mfi)RuSSeLL 
 
 LONDON 
 SMITH, FJ,DKR >\- CO., 15, WAIT.RLOO PLACE 
 
 1907 
 
 All right! reserved
 
 
 PRINTED liV 
 
 WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 
 LONDON AND BECCLKS.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT 
 
 AND 
 
 MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 BEING THE LETTERS OF AN 
 INDEPENDENT WOMAN 
 
 I 
 
 Jena, Nov. 6. 
 
 Dear Roger, — This Is only to tell you that I 
 love you, supposing you should have forgotten 
 It by the time you get to London. The letter 
 will follow you by the train after the one you left 
 by, and you will have it with your breakfast the 
 day after to-morrow. Then you will be eating 
 the marmalade Jena could not produce, and you'll 
 say, " What a very indiscreet young woman to 
 write first." But look at the " Dear Roger," and 
 you'll sec I'm not so indiscreet after all. What 
 could be more sober ? And you've no idea of all 
 the nice things I could have put instead of that, 
 only I wouldn't. It is a most extraordinary thing 
 that this time yesterday we were on the polite- 
 conversation footing, you, in your beautiful new 
 German, carefully calling me gncidiges Friiukin 
 
 » B
 
 2 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 at every second breath, and I making appropriate 
 answers to the Mr. Anstruther who in one be- 
 wildering hour turned for me Into Dear Roger. 
 Did you always like me so much ? — I mean, love 
 me so much ? My spirit is rather unbendable as 
 yet to the softnesses of these strange words, stiff 
 for want of use, so forgive a tendency to go round 
 them. Don't you think it is very wonderful that 
 you should have been here a whole year, living 
 with us, seeing me every day, practising your 
 German on me — oh, wasn't 1 patient ? — and 
 never have shown the least sign that I could see 
 of thinking of me or of caring for me at all 
 except as a dim sort of young lady who assisted 
 her stepmother in the work of properly mending 
 and feeding you .'' And then an hour ago, just 
 one hour by that absurd cuckoo-clock here in this 
 room where we said good-bye, you suddenly 
 turned into something marvellous, splendid, soul- 
 thriUing — well, into Dear Roger. It is so funny 
 that I've been laughing, and so sweet that I've 
 been crying. I'm so happy that I can't help 
 writing, though I do think .it rather gushing — 
 loathsome word — to write first. But then you 
 strictly charged me not to tell a soul yet, and how 
 can 1 keep altogether quiet ? You, then, my 
 poor Roger, must be the one to listen. Do you 
 know what Jena looks like to-night ? It is the 
 most dazzling place in the world, radiant with 
 promise, shining and dancing with all sorts of 
 little lovely lights that I know are only the lamps 
 being lit in people's rooms down the street, but
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 3 
 
 that look to me extraordinarily like stars of hope 
 come out, in defiance of nature and fog, to give 
 me a glorious welcome. You see, I'm new, and 
 they know it. I'm not the Rose-Marie they've 
 twinkled down on from the day I was born till 
 to-night. She was a dull person : a mere ordinary, 
 dull person, climbing doggedly up the rows of 
 hours each day set before her, doggedly doing 
 certain things she was told were her daily duties, 
 equally doggedly circumventing certain others, 
 and actually supposing she was happy. Happy ? 
 She was not. She was most wretched. She was 
 blind and deaf. She was asleep. She was only 
 half a woman. What is the good or the beauty 
 of anything, alive or dead, in the world, that has 
 not fulfilled its destiny .? And I never saw that 
 before. I never saw a great many things before. 
 I am amazed at the suddenness of my awaking. 
 Love passed through this house to-day, this house 
 that other people think is just the same dull place 
 it was yesterday, and behold — well, I won't grow 
 magnificent, and it is what you do if you begin 
 a sentence with " Behold." But really there's a 
 splendour — oh well. And as for this room where 
 you — where I — where we — well, I won't grow 
 sentimental either, though now 1 know, I who 
 always scoffed at it, how fatally easy a thing it 
 is to be. That is, supposing one has had great 
 provocation ; and haven't I ? Oh, haven't 1 ? 
 
 I had got. as far as that when your beloved 
 Professor Martens came in, very much agitated 
 because he had missed you at the station, wiicre
 
 4 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 he had been to give you a send-off. And what 
 do you think he said ? He said, why did I sit 
 in this dreary hole without a lamp, and why 
 didn't I draw the curtains, and shut out the fog 
 and drizzle. Fog and drizzle ? It really seemed 
 too funny. Why, the whole sky is shining. And 
 as for the dreary hole — gracious heavens, is it 
 possible that just being old made him not able 
 to feel how the air of the room was still quiver- 
 ing with all you said to me, with all the sweet, 
 wonderful, precious things you said to me ? The 
 place was full of you. And there was your 
 darling coffee-cup still where you had put it down, 
 and the very rug we stood on still all ruffled up. 
 
 " I think it's a glorious hole," I couldn't help 
 saying. 
 
 " De gustihm^'' said he, indulgently ; and he 
 stretched himself in the easy-chair — the one you 
 used to sit in — and said he should miss young 
 Anstruther. 
 
 « Shall you ? " said I. 
 
 " Fraulein Rose-Marie," said he, solemnly, 
 " he was a most intelligent young man. Quite 
 the most intelligent young man I have ever 
 had here." 
 
 " Really ? " said I, smiling all over my silly 
 face. 
 
 And so of course you were, or how would 
 you ever have found out that I — well, that I'm 
 not wholly unlovable ? 
 
 Yours quite, quite truly, 
 
 R.-M.
 
 11 
 
 Jena, Nov. 7. 
 
 Dear Roger, — You left on Tuesday night — 
 that's yesterday — and you'll get to London on 
 Thursday morning — that's to-morrow — and first 
 you'll want to wash yourself, and have breakfast 
 — please notice my extreme reasonableness — and it 
 will be about eleven before you are able to begin 
 to write to me. I shan't get the letter till 
 Saturday, and to-day is only Wednesday, so how 
 can I stop myself from writing to you again, I 
 should like to know .'' I simply can't. Besides, 
 I want to tell you all the heaps of Important 
 things I would have told you yesterday, if there 
 had been time when you asked me in that amazing 
 sudden way if I'd marry you. 
 
 Do you know I'm poor ? Of course you do. 
 You couldn't have lived with us a year and not 
 seen by the very sort of puddings we have that 
 we are poor. Do you think that anybody who 
 can help it would have dicker Reis three times a 
 week ? And then if we were not, my stepmother 
 would never bother to take in English young 
 men who want to study German ; she would do 
 quite different sorts of things, and we should have 
 different sorts of puddings — proud ones, with 
 
 5
 
 6 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Schlagsahne on their tops — and two servants 
 instead of one, and I would never have met you. 
 Well, you know then that we are poor ; but I 
 don't believe you know hozv poor. When girls 
 here marry, their parents give them, as a matter- 
 of-course, house-linen enough to last them all 
 their lives, furniture enough to furnish all their 
 house, clothes enough for several generations, 
 and so much a year besides. Then, greatly im- 
 poverished, they spend the evenings of their days 
 doing without things and congratulating them- 
 selves on having married off their daughter. The 
 man need give only himself. You've heard that 
 my own mother, who died ten years ago, was 
 English ? Yes, I remember I told you that, when 
 you were so much surprised at what you called, 
 in politest German, my colossally good English. 
 From her 1 know that people in England do not 
 buy their son-in-law's carpets and saucepans, but 
 confine their helpfulness to suggesting Maple. 
 It is the husband, they think, who should, like 
 the storks of the Fatherland, prepare and beautify 
 the nest for the wife. If the girl has money, so 
 much the better ; but if she has not, said my 
 mother, it doesn't put an absolute stop to her 
 marrying. 
 
 Here, it does ; and I belong here. My 
 mother had some money, or my father would 
 never have let himself fall in love with her — I 
 believe you can nip these things in the bud if you 
 see the bud in time — and you know my father is 
 not a mercenary man ; he only, like the rest of
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 7 
 
 us, could not get away altogether from his brhiging- 
 up and the points of view he had been made to 
 stare from ever since he stared at all. It was a 
 hundred a year (pounds, thank Heaven, not marks), 
 and it is all we have except what he gets for his 
 books, when he does get anything, which is never, 
 and what my stepmother has, which is an annuity 
 of a hundred and fifty pounds. So the hundred 
 a year will be the whole sum of my riches, for I 
 have no aunts. What I want you to consider Is 
 the awfulness of marrying a woman absolutely 
 without saucepans. Not a single towel will she 
 be able to add to your linen-room, not a single 
 pot to your kitchen. All Jena when it hears of it 
 will say, "Poor, Infatuated young man," and if I 
 had sisters all England would refuse in future to 
 send its sons to my stepmother. Why, if you 
 were making a decently suitable marriage do you 
 suppose your Braut would have to leave off writing 
 to you at this point, in the very middle of luminous 
 prophecy, and hurry into the kitchen and Immerse 
 herself in the preparation of potato soup ? Yet 
 that is exactly what your Braut^ who has caught 
 sight of the clock, is about to do. So good-bye. 
 Your poor, but Infinitely honest 
 
 R.-M. 
 
 See how wise and practical I am to-day. I 
 believe my letter last night was rather aflame. 
 Now comes morning with its palls of cold water, 
 and drenches me back into discretion. Thank 
 God, say I, for mornings.
 
 Ill 
 
 Jena, Nov. 8. 
 
 Dear Roger, — I can't leave you alone, you 
 see. I must write. But though I must write 
 you need not read. Last night 1 was seized with 
 misgivings — awful things for a hitherto placid 
 Fraulein to be seized with — and I wrestled with 
 them all night, and they won. So now, in the 
 calm frostiness of the early morning atmosphere, 
 I wish to inquire very seriously, very soberly, 
 whether you have not made a mistake. In one 
 sense, of course, you have. It is absurd, from a 
 worldly point of view, for you to marry me. But 
 1 mean more than that : I mean, have you not 
 mistaken your own feelings, being hurled into the 
 engagement by impulsiveness, by, if you choose, 
 some spell I may unconsciously have put upon 
 you ? If you have even quite a faint misgiving 
 about what you really feel for me, tell me — oh, 
 tell me straight and plainly, and we will both rub 
 out that one weak hour with a sponge well soaked 
 in common sense. It would not hurt so much, I 
 think, now as it might later on. Up to last night, 
 since you left, I've been walking on air. It is a 
 most pleasant form of exercise, as perhaps you 
 know. You not only walk on air, but you walk 
 in what seems to be an arrested sunset, a bath of 
 
 8
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 9 
 
 liquid gold, breathing it, touching it, wrapped in 
 it. It really is most pleasant. Well, I did that 
 till last night ; then came my stepmother, and 
 catching at my flying feet pulled them down till 
 they got to the painted deal floors of Rauchgasse 
 5, Jena, and once having got there, stuck there. 
 Observe, I speak in images. My stepmother, so 
 respectable, so solidly Christian, would not dream 
 of catching hold of anybody's feet and spoiling 
 their little bit of happiness. Quite unconsciously 
 she blew on that glow of sunset in which I was 
 flying, and it went out with the promptness and 
 completeness of a tallow candle, and down came 
 Rose-Marie with a thud. Yes, I did come down 
 with a thud. You will never be able to pretend, 
 however much you try, that I'm one of your fairy 
 little women that can be lifted about, and dandled, 
 and sugared with dainty diminutives, will you ? 
 Facts are things that are best faced. I stand five 
 feet ten without my heels, and when I fdl I do it 
 with a thud. Said my stepmother, then, after 
 supper, when Johanna had cleared the last plate 
 away, and we were sitting alone — my father is not 
 back yet from Weimar — she on one side of the 
 table, I on the other, the lamp in the middle, 
 your chair gaping empty, she, poor herself, knitting 
 wool into warmth for the yet jioorcr at Christmas, 
 I mending the towels you helped to wear out, 
 while my spirit soared and made a joyful noise 
 somewhere far away, up among angels and arch- 
 angels and other happy beings — said my step- 
 mother, " Why do you look so pleased ? "
 
 10 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Slightly startled, I explained that I looked 
 pleased because I was pleased. 
 
 " But nothing has happened," said my step- 
 mother, examining me over her spectacles. " You 
 have been nowhere to-day, and not seen any one, 
 and the dinner was not at all good." 
 
 "For all that, I'm pleased. I don't need to 
 go somewhere or see some one to be pleased. I 
 can be it quite by myself." 
 
 " Yes, you are blest with a contented nature, 
 that is true," said my stepmother, with a sigh, 
 knitting faster. You remember her sighs, don't 
 you ? They are always to me very unaccountable. 
 They come in such odd places. Why should she 
 sigh because I have a contented nature ? Ought 
 she not rather to rejoice ? But the extremely 
 religious people I have known have all sighed 
 an immense deal. Well, I won't probe into that 
 now, though I rather long to. 
 
 " I suppose it's because it has been a fine day," 
 I said, foolishly going on explaining to a person 
 already satisfied. 
 
 My stepmother looked up sharply. " But 
 it has not been fine at all, Rose-Marie," she 
 said. "The sun has not appeared once all 
 day." 
 
 " What ? " said I, for a moment genuinely 
 surprised. I couldn't help being happy, and I 
 don't believe really happy people are ever in the 
 least aware that the sun is not shining. " Oh 
 well," I hurried on, " perhaps not an Italian blue 
 sky, but still mild, and very sweet, and November
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER ii 
 
 always smells of violets, and that's another thing 
 to be pleased about." 
 
 "Violets?" echoed my stepmother, who dis- 
 likes all talk about things one can neither eat nor 
 warm one's self with nor read about in the Bible. 
 "Do you not miss Mr. Anstruther," she asked, 
 getting off such flabbinesses as quickly as she 
 could, "with whom you were so constantly 
 talking ? " 
 
 Of course I jumped. But I said "Yes," quite 
 naturally, 1 think. 
 
 It was then that she pulled me down by the 
 feet to earth. 
 
 " He has a great future before him," she said. 
 " A young man so clever, so good looking, and 
 so well connected may rise to anything. Martens 
 tells me he has the most brilliant prospects. He 
 will be a great ornament to the English diplomatic 
 service. Martens says his father's hopes are all 
 centred on this only son. And as he has very 
 little money and much will be required, Roger " 
 — she said it indeed — " is to marry as soon as 
 possible, some one who will help him in every 
 way, some one as wealthy as she is well born." 
 
 I murmured something suitable ; I think a 
 commendation of the plan as prudent. 
 
 " No one could help liking Roger," she went 
 on — Roger, do you like being Rogercd .'' — "and 
 my only fear is, and Martens fears it too, that he 
 will entangle himself with some undesirable girl. 
 
 Then he is ruined. There would be no hope for 
 
 h>» 
 im.
 
 12 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " But why " I began ; then suffocated a 
 
 moment behind a towel. "But why," I said 
 again, gasping, " should he ? " 
 
 " Well, let us hope he will not. I fear, 
 though, he is soft. Still, he has steered safely 
 through a year often dangerous to young men. 
 It is true his father could not have sent him to a 
 
 safer place than my house. You so sensible " 
 
 oh, Roger ! — " Besides being arrived at an age 
 when serious and practical thoughts replace the 
 foolish sentimentalness of earlier years," — oh, 
 Roger, I'm twenty-five, and not a single one of my 
 foolish sentimentalnesses has been replaced by 
 anything at all. Do you think there is hope for 
 me ? Do you think it is very bad to feel exactly 
 the same, just exactly as calf-like now as I did at 
 fifteen ? — "so that under my roof," went on my 
 stepmother, " he has been perfectly safe. It would 
 have been truly deplorable if his year in Germany 
 had saddled him with a German wife from a circle 
 beneath his own, a girl who had caught his pass- 
 ing fancy by youth and prettiness, and who would 
 have spent the rest of her life dragging him down, 
 an ever-present punishment with a faded face." 
 
 She is eloquent, isn't she ? Eloquent with 
 the directness that instinctively finds out one's 
 weak spots and aims straight at them. "Luckily," 
 she concluded, " there are no pretty faces in Jena 
 just now." 
 
 Then I held a towel up before my own, before 
 my ignominious face, excluded by a most excellent 
 critic from the category pretty, and felt as though
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 13 
 
 I would hide It for ever in stacks of mending, in 
 tubs of soup, in everything domestic and drudging 
 and appropriate. But some of the words you 
 rained down on me on Tuesday night between 
 all those kisses came throbbing through my head, 
 throbbing with great throbs through my whole 
 body — Roger, did 1 hear wrong, or were they not 
 " Lovely — lovely — lovely " ? And always kisses 
 between, and always again that " Lovely — lovely 
 — lovely " ? Where am I getting to ? Perhaps 
 I had better stop. 
 
 R.-M.
 
 IV 
 
 Jena, Nov. i». 
 
 Dearest of Living Creatures, — The joy your 
 dear, dear letters gave me I You should have 
 seen me seize the postman. His very fingers 
 seemed rosy-tipped as he gave me the precious 
 things. Two of them — two love-letters all at 
 once. I could hardly bear to open them, and put 
 an end to the wonderful moment. The first one, 
 from Frankfurt, was so sweet — oh, so unutterably 
 sweet — that I did sit gloating over the unbroken 
 envelope of the other for at least five minutes, 
 luxuriating, purring. I found out exactly where 
 your hand must have been, by the simple process 
 of getting a pen and pretending to write the 
 address where you had written it, and then spent 
 another five minutes most profitably kissing the 
 place. Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, but 
 there shall be no so-called maidenly simperings 
 between you and me, no pretences, no affectations. 
 If it was silly to kiss that blessed envelope, and 
 silly to tell you that I did, why then I was silly, 
 and there's an end of it. 
 
 Do you know that my mother's maiden name 
 was Watson ? Well, it was. I feel bound to tell 
 you this, for it seems to add to my ineligibleness,
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 15 
 
 and my duty plainly is to take you all round 
 that and expatiate on it from every point of view. 
 What has the grandson of Lord Grasmere — you 
 never told me of Lord G. before, by the way — to 
 do with the granddaughter of Watson ? I don't 
 even rightly know what Watson was. He was 
 always for me an obscure and rather awful figure, 
 shrouded in mystery. Of course Papa could tell 
 me about him, but as he never has, and my mother 
 rarely mentioned him, I fancy he was not any- 
 thing I should be proud of Do not, then, require 
 of me that I shall tear the veil from Watson. 
 
 And of course your mother was handsome. 
 How dare you doubt it ? Look in the glass and 
 be grateful to her. You know, though you may 
 only have come within the spell of what you so 
 sweetly call my darling brown eyes during the last 
 few weeks, I fell a victim to your darling blue 
 ones in the first five minutes. And how great 
 was my joy when I discovered that your soul so 
 exactly matched your outside. Your mother had 
 blue eyes, too, and was very tall, and had an 
 extraordinarily thoughtful face. Look, I tell you, 
 in the glass, and you'll see she had, for I refuse 
 to believe that your father, a man who talks port 
 wine and tomatoes the whole of the first meal he 
 has with his only son after a year's separation, is 
 the parent you are like. Heavens, how 1 shake 
 when I think of what will happen when you tell 
 him about me. " Sir," he'll say in a voice of 
 thunder — or don't angry English parents call 
 their sons "sir " any more? Anyhow, they still
 
 1 6 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR, ANSTRUTHER 
 
 do in books — "Sir, you arc far too young to marry. 
 Young men of twenty-five do not do such things. 
 The lady, I conclude, will provide the income ? " 
 
 Roger, rushing to the point : She hasn't a 
 pfenning. 
 
 Incensed Parent : Pfenning, sir ? What, am 
 I to understand she's a German ? 
 
 Roger, dreadfully frightened : Please. 
 
 I. P., forcing himself to be calm : Who is this 
 young person } 
 
 Roger : Fraulcin Schmidt, of Jena. 
 
 I. P., now of a horrible calmness : And who, 
 pray, is Fraulein Schmidt of Jena ? 
 
 Roger, pale but brave : The daughter of old 
 Schmidt, in whose house I boarded. Her mother 
 was English. She was a Watson. 
 
 I. P. : Sir, oblige me by going to the 
 
 Roger goes. 
 
 Seriously, I think something of the sort will 
 happen. I don't see how it can help giving your 
 father a dreadful shock ; and suppose he gets ill, 
 and his blood is on my head ? I can't see how 
 it is to be avoided. There is nothing to recom- 
 mend me to him. He'll know I'm poor. He'll 
 doubt if Pm respectable. He won't even think 
 me pretty. You might tell him that I can cook, 
 darn, manage as well as the thriftiest of Hausfraus^ 
 and I believe it would leave him cold. You 
 might dwell on my riper age as an advantage : say 
 1 have lived down the first fevers of youth — I 
 never had them ; say, if he objects to it, that Eve 
 was as old as Adam when they started life in their
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 17 
 
 happy garden, and yet they got on very well ; say 
 that I'm beautiful as an angel, or so plain that I 
 am of necessity sensible, and he'll only answer 
 " Fool." Do you see anything to be done ? I 
 don't ; but I'm too happy to bother. 
 
 Later. 
 
 I had to go and help get supper ready. 
 Johanna had let the fire out, and it took rather 
 ages. Why do you say you feel like screaming 
 when you think of me wrestling with Johanna ? 
 I tell you I'm so happy that nothing any Johanna 
 can do or leave undone in the least affects me. 
 I go about the house on tiptoe ; I am super- 
 stitious, and have an idea that all sorts of little 
 envious Furies are lying about in dusty corners 
 asleep, put to sleep by you, and that if I don't 
 move very delicately I shall wake them — 
 
 O Freiule, habe Acht, 
 Sprlch Icise, dass nicht der Schmerz erwacht. . . . 
 
 That's not Goethe. By the way, poor Goethe. 
 What an unforeseen result of a year in the City 
 of the Muses, half an hour's journey from the 
 11m Athens itself, that you should pronounce his 
 poetry coarse, obvious, and commonplace. What 
 would Papa say if he knew .'' Probably that 
 young Anstruthcr is not the intelligent young 
 man he took him for. But then Papa is soaked 
 in Goethe, and the longer he soaks the more he 
 adores him. In this faith, in this Goethe-worship, 
 I have been brought up, and cannot, I'm afraid, 
 get rid of it all at once. It is even possible that 
 
 c 
 
 t*-
 
 18 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 I never shall, in spite of London and you. Will 
 you love mc less; if I don't .'' Always I have 
 thought Goethe uninspired. The Muse never 
 seized and shook him till divinenesses dropped 
 off his pen without his knowing how or whence, 
 divinenesses like those you find sometimes in the 
 pages of lesser men, lesser all-round men, stamped 
 with the unmistakable stamp of heavenly birth. 
 Goethe knew, very well, very exactly, where each 
 of his sentences had come from. But I don't see 
 that his poetry is cither of the three things you 
 say. I'm afraid it is not the last two, for the 
 world would grow very interesting if thinking 
 and writing as he did were so obvious that we 
 all did it. As to its being coarse, I'm incurably 
 incapable of seeing coarseness in things. To me 
 
 All is clean for ever and ever. 
 
 Everything is natural and everything Is clean, 
 except for the person who is afraid it isn't. 
 Perhaps, dear Roger, you won't, as Papa says, 
 quite apprehend my meaning ; if you cannot, 
 please console yourself with the reflection that 
 probably I haven't got one. 
 
 What you say about the money you'll have 
 dazzles me. Why, it's a fortune. We shall be 
 richer than our Biirgermeister. You never told 
 me you were so rich. Five hundred pounds a 
 year is ten thousand marks ; nearly double what 
 we have always lived on, and we've really been 
 quite comfortable, now, haven't we .'' But think 
 of our glory when my hundred pounds is added,
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 19 
 
 and we have an income of twelve thousand marks. 
 The Biirgermeister will be utterly eclipsed. And 
 I'm such a good manager. You'll see how we'll 
 live. You'll grow quite fat. I shall give you 
 lovely food ; and Papa says that lovely food is 
 the one thing that ever really makes a man give 
 himself the trouble to rise up and call his wife 
 blessed. 
 
 It is so late. Good night. 
 
 R.-M. 
 
 Don't take my Gocthe-love from me. I 
 know simply masses of him, and can't let him go. 
 My mind is decked out with him as a garden is 
 decked with flowers. Now, isn't that pretty ? 
 Or is it only silly ? Anyhow, it's dreadfully late. 
 
 Good night.
 
 Jena, Nov. 13. 
 
 No letter from you to-day. I am afraid you 
 are being worried, and because of me. Here am 
 I, quiet and cheerful, nobody bothering me, and 
 your dear image in my heart to warm every 
 minute of life ; there are you, being forced to 
 think things out, to make plans for the future, 
 decide on courses of action, besides having to 
 pass exams, and circumvent a parent whom I 
 gather you regard as refractory. How lucky I 
 am in my dear father ! If I could have chosen, 
 I would have chosen him. Never has he been 
 any trouble. Never does he bore me. Never 
 am I forced to criticisms. He knows that I have 
 no brains, and has forgiven me. I know he 
 hasn't much common sense, and have forgiven 
 him. We spend our time spoiling and petting 
 and loving each other — do you remember how 
 you sometimes laughed } 
 
 But I wish you were not worried. It is all 
 because I'm so ineligible. If 1 could come to 
 you with a pot of money in each hand, turned by 
 an appreciative ruler into Baroness von Schmidt, 
 with a Papa in my train weighed down by Orders, 
 and the road behind me black with carts containing 
 
 zo
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 21 
 
 clothes, your father would be merciful unto us 
 and bless us. As things arc, you are already 
 being punished, you have already begun to pay 
 the penalty for that one little hour's happiness ; 
 and it won't be quite paid ever, not so long as 
 we both shall live. Do you, who think so much, 
 ever think of the almost indecent haste with 
 which punishments hurry in the wake of joys ? 
 They really seem to tumble over one another in 
 their eagerness each to get there first. You took 
 me to your heart, told me you loved me, asked 
 me to be your wife. Was it so wrong .'' So 
 wrong to let one's self go to happiness for those 
 few moments that one should immediately be 
 punished } My father will not let me believe 
 anything. He says — when my stepmother is not 
 listening ; when she is he doesn't — that belief is 
 not faith, and you can't believe if you do not 
 know. But he cannot stop my silently believing 
 that the Power in whose clutches we are is an 
 amazing disciplinarian, a relentless grudger of 
 joys. And what pitiful small joys they are, after 
 all. Pitiful little attempts of souls doomed to 
 eternal solitude to put out feelers in the dark, to 
 get close to each other, to touch each other, to try 
 to make each other warm. Now I am growing 
 lugubrious; I who thought never to be lugubrious 
 again. And at ten o'clock on a fine November 
 morning, of all times in the world. 
 
 Papa comes back from Weimar to-day. There 
 has been a prolonged meeting there of local lights 
 about the damage done by some Goth to the
 
 2 2 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Shakespeare statue in the park ; and though 
 Papa is not a light, still he did burn with indigna- 
 tion over that, and has been making impassioned 
 speeches, and suggesting punishments for the 
 Goth when they shall have caught him. I think 
 I shall go over by the two o'clock train and meet 
 him and bring him home, and look in at Goethe's 
 sponge on the way. You know how the little 
 black thing lies in his bedroom there, next to a 
 basin not much bigger than a breakfast-cup. 
 With this he washed and was satisfied. And 
 whenever I feel depressed, out of countenance 
 with myself and life, I go and look at it and come 
 home cheered and strengthened. I wonder if 
 you'll be able to make out why ? Bless you my 
 dearest. 
 
 R.-M.
 
 VI 
 
 Jena, Nov. 14. 
 
 That sponge had no effect yesterday. I stared 
 and stared at it, and it only remained a sponge, 
 far too small for the really cleanly, instead of what 
 it has up to now been, the starting-point for a 
 train of thrilling, enthusiastic thoughts. I'm an 
 unbalanced creature. Do you divide your time 
 too, I wonder, between knocking your head 
 against the stars and, in some freezing depth of 
 blackness, listening to your heart, how it will 
 hardly beat for fear .? Of course you don't. You 
 are much too clever. And then you have been 
 educated, trained, taught to keep your thoughts 
 within bounds, and not let them start off every 
 minute on fresh and aimless wanderings. Yet 
 the star-knocking is so wonderful that 1 believe 
 I would rather freeze the whole year round for 
 one hour of it than go back again to the changeless 
 calm, the winter-afternoon sunshine, in which I 
 used to sit before 1 knew you. All this only 
 means that you have not written. See how 
 variously one can state a fact. 
 
 I have run away from the sitting-room and 
 the round table and the lamp, because Papa and 
 my stepmother had begun to discuss you again, 
 
 23
 
 2+ FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 your prospects, your probable hideous fate if you 
 were not prudent, your glorious career if you 
 were. I felt guilty, wounded, triumphant, vain, 
 all at once. Papa, of course, was chiefly the 
 listener. He agreed ; or at most he temporized. 
 I tell you, Roger, I am amazed at the power 
 a woman has over her husband if she Is in every 
 way inferior to him. It is not only that, as we 
 say, der Klugere gieht nach, it Is the daily complete 
 victory of the coarser over the finer, the rough 
 over the gentle, the ignorant over the wise. My 
 stepmother is an uneducated person, shrewd 
 about all the things that do not matter, unaware 
 of the very existence of the things that do, ready 
 to be charitable, helpful, where the calamity is 
 big enough, wholly unsympathetic, even antago- 
 nistic, towards all those many small calamities 
 that make up one's years ; the sort of woman 
 parsons praise, and who get tombstones put over 
 them at last peppered with frigid adjectives like 
 virtuous and just. Did you ever chance to live 
 with a just person ? They are very chilling, and 
 not so rare as one might suppose. And Papa, 
 laxest, most tolerant of men, so lax that nothing 
 seems to him altogether bad, so tolerant that 
 nobody, however hard he tries, can pass, he thinks, 
 beyond the reach of forgiveness and love, so 
 humorous that he has to fight continually to 
 suppress it — for humour lands one in odd morasses 
 of dislike and misconception here — married her 
 a year after my mother died, and did it wholly 
 for my sake. Imagine it. She was to make me
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 25 
 
 happy. Imagine that too. I was not any longer 
 to be a solitary Backfisch^ with holes In her 
 stockings and riotous hair. There came a painful 
 time when Papa began to suspect that the rough- 
 ness of my hair might conceivably be a symbol 
 of the dishevelment of my soul. Neighbouring 
 matrons pointed out the possibility to him. He 
 took to peering anxiously at unimportant parts 
 of me, such as my nails, and was startled to see 
 them often black. He cau":ht me once or twice 
 red-eyed in corners, when it had happened that 
 the dear ways and pretty looks of my darling 
 mother had come back for a moment with extra 
 vividness. He decided that 1 was both dirty and 
 wretched, and argued, I am sure during sleepless 
 nights, that I would probably go on being dirty 
 and wretched for ever. And so he put on his 
 best clothes one day, and set out doggedly in 
 search of a wife. 
 
 He found her quite easily, in a house in the 
 next street. She was making doughnuts, for it 
 was the afternoon of New Year's Eve. She had 
 just taken them out of the oven, and they were 
 obviously successful. Papa loves doughnuts. 
 His dinner had been uneatable. The weather 
 was cold. She took off her apron, and piled 
 them on a dish, and carried them, scattering 
 fragrance as they went, into the sitting-room ; 
 and the smell ot them was grateful ; and they 
 were very hot. 
 
 Papa came home engaged. " I am not, as a 
 rule, in favour of second marriages, Rose- Marie,"
 
 26 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 he began, breaking the news to me with elaborate 
 art. 
 
 "Oh, horrid things," I remarked, my arm 
 round his neck, my face against his, for even then 
 I was as tall as he. You know how he begins 
 abruptly about anything that happens to cross 
 his mind, so I was not surprised. 
 
 He rubbed his nose violently. " I never 
 knew anybody with such hair as yours for tickling 
 a person," he said, trying to push it back behind 
 my ears. Of course it would not go. " Would 
 it do that," he added suspiciously, " if it were 
 properly brushed ? " 
 
 " I don't know. Well, Papachen ? " 
 
 « Well, what ? " 
 
 " About second marriages." 
 
 He had forgotten, and he started. In an 
 instant I knew. I took my arm away quickly, 
 but put it back again just as quickly and pressed 
 my face still closer : it was better we should not 
 see each other's eyes while he told me. 
 
 " I am not, as a rule, in favour of them," he 
 repeated, when he had coughed and tried a second 
 time to induce my hair to go behind my ears ; 
 " but there are cases where they are — imperative." 
 
 "Which ones.?" 
 
 " Why, if a man is left with little children, 
 for instance." 
 
 " Then he engages a good nurse.'* 
 
 " Or his children run wild." 
 
 "Then he gets a severe aunt to live with 
 him."
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 27 
 
 " Or they grow up." 
 
 " Then they take care of themselves." 
 
 " Or he is an old man left with, say, one 
 daughter." 
 
 " Then she would take care of him." 
 
 "And who would take care of her, Rose- 
 Marie .? " 
 
 « He would." 
 
 " And if he is an Incapable ? An old person 
 totally unable to notice lapses from convention, 
 from social customs ? If no one is there to tell 
 her how to dress and how to behave .? And she 
 is growing up, and yet remains a barbarian, and 
 the day is not far distant when she must go out, 
 and he knows that when she does go out Jena 
 will be astounded." 
 
 " Does the barbarian live in Jena ? " 
 
 " My dear, she is universal. Wherever there 
 is a widower with an only female child, there 
 e is. 
 
 *' But if she had been happy ? " 
 
 " But she had not been happy. She used to 
 cry. 
 
 " Oh, of course she used to cry sometimes, 
 when she thought more than usual of her sweet — 
 
 of her sweet But for all that she had been 
 
 happy, and so had he. Why, you know he had. 
 Didn't she look after him, and keep house for 
 him .'' Didn't she cook for him ,? Not very 
 beautifully, perhaps, but still she did cook, and 
 there was dinner every day. Didn't she go to 
 market three times a week, and taste all the
 
 28 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 butter ? Didn't she help to do the rooms ? 
 And in the evenings weren't they happy together, 
 with nobody to worry them ? And then, when 
 he missed his darling wife, didn't the barbarian 
 always know he was doing it, and come and sit 
 on his knee, and kiss him, and make up for it ? 
 Didn't she ? Now didn't she ? " 
 
 Papa unwound himself, and walked up and 
 down with a desperate face. 
 
 " Girls of sixteen must learn how to dress and 
 to behave. A father cannot show them that," he 
 said. 
 
 " But they do dress and behave." 
 
 " Rose-Marie, unmended stockings are not 
 dressing. And to talk to a learned stranger well 
 advanced in years with the freedom of his equal 
 in age and knowledge, as I saw one doing lately, 
 is not behaving." 
 
 " Oh, papa, she wouldn't do that again, I'm 
 certain." 
 
 " She wouldn't have done it that once if she 
 had had a mother." 
 
 " But the poor wretch hadn't got a mother." 
 
 " Exactly. A mother, therefore, must be 
 provided." 
 
 Here, I remember, there was a long pause. 
 Papa walked, and 1 watched him in despair. 
 Despair, too, was in his own face. He had had 
 time to forget the doughnuts, and how cold he 
 had been, and how hungry. So shaken was I 
 that I actually suggested the engagement of a 
 finishing governess to finish that which had never
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 29 
 
 been begun, pointing out that she, at least, having 
 finished would go ; and he said he could not 
 afford one ; and he added the amazing statement 
 that a wife was cheaper. 
 
 Well, I suppose she has been cheap : that is, 
 she has made one of Papa's marks go as far as two 
 of other people's ; but oh how expensive she has 
 been in other ways ! She has ruined us in such 
 things as freedom, and sweetness, and light. 
 You know the sort of talk here at meals. I wish 
 you could have heard it before her time. She 
 has such a strong personality that somehow we 
 have always followed her lead ; and Papa, who 
 used to bubble out streams of gaiety when he 
 and I sat untidily on either side of a tureen of 
 horrible bad soup, who talked of all things under 
 heaven, and with undaunted audacity of many 
 things in it, and who somehow put a snap and a 
 sparkle into whatever he said, sits like a school- 
 boy invited to a meal at his master's, eager to 
 agree, anxious to give satisfaction. The wax 
 cloth on the table is clean and shiny ; the spoons 
 are bright ; a cruet with clear oil and nice-looking 
 vinegar stands in the midst ; the food, though 
 simple, is hot and decent ; we are quite comfort- 
 able ; and any of the other Jena Ilausfraus coming 
 in during a meal would certainly cry out Wie 
 gemuthlich. But of what use is it to be white- 
 washed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers 
 and tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders 
 through empty rooms, mournfully shivers in 
 damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings
 
 30 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 it food, is cold and no one lights a fire, is 
 miserable and tired and there's not a chair to 
 sit on ? 
 
 Why I write all this I can't think ; except 
 that I feel as if I were talking to you. You 
 must tell me if I bore you. When I begin a 
 letter to you the great difficulty is to leave off 
 again. Oh, how warm it makes one feel to know 
 that there is one person in the world to whom 
 one is everything. A lover is the most precious, 
 the most marvellous possession. No wonder 
 people like having them. And I used to think 
 that so silly. Heavens, what an absurd person 
 I have been ! Why, love is the one thing worth 
 having. Everything else, talents, work, arts, 
 religion, learning, the whole tremhlement^ are so 
 many drugs with which the starved, the loverless, 
 try to dull their pangs, to put themselves to sleep. 
 Good night, and God bless you a thousand times. 
 
 R.-M.
 
 VII 
 
 Jena, Nov. 15, ii p.m. 
 
 Dearest, — Your letter came this afternoon. 
 How glad I was to get it. And I do think it 
 a good idea to go down into the country to those 
 Americans before your exam. Who knows but 
 they may, by giving you peace at the right 
 moment, be the means of making you pass extra 
 brilliantly ? That you should not pass at all is 
 absolutely out of the question. Why have the 
 gods showered gifts on you if not for the 'proper 
 passing of exams. ? For I suppose in this as in 
 everything else there are different ways, ways of 
 excellence and mediocrity. I know which way 
 yours will be. If only the presence of my spirit 
 by your side on Saturday could be of use. But 
 that's the worst of spirits : they never seem to be 
 the least good unless they take their bodies with 
 them. Yet mine burns so hotly when I am 
 thinking of you — and when am I not thinking 
 of you ? — that I feel as if you actually must feci 
 the glow of it as it follows you about. How 
 strange and dreadful love is 1 Till you know it, 
 you are so sure the world is very good and pleasant 
 up in those serene, frost-bitten regions where you 
 stand alone, breathing the thin air of family 
 
 3»
 
 32 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 affection, shone upon gently by the mild and misty 
 sun of general esteem. Then comes love, and 
 pulls you down. For isn't it a descent .'' Isn't 
 it ? Somehow, though it is so great a glory, it's 
 a coming-down as well — down from the pride of 
 absolute independence of body and soul, down 
 from the high-mightiness of indifference, to some- 
 thing fierce, and hot, and consuming. Oh, I 
 daren't tell you how little of serenity 1 have left. 
 At first, just at first, I didn't feel like this. I 
 think I was stunned. My soul seemed to stand 
 still. Surely it was extraordinary, that tem- 
 pestuous crossing from the calm of careless 
 friendship to the place where love dashes madly 
 against the rocks ^ Don't laugh at my images. 
 I'm in deadly earnest to-night. I do feel that 
 love hurts. I do feel as if I'd been thrown on 
 to rocks, left by myself on them to come slowly 
 to my senses and find I am lying alone in a new 
 and burning sun. It's an exquisite sort of pain, 
 but it's very nearly unbearable. You see, you 
 are so far away. And I, I'm learning for the first 
 time in my life what it means, that saying about 
 eating out one's heart. 
 
 R.-M.
 
 VIII 
 
 Jena, Nov. i6, 9 a.m. 
 
 Really, my dear Roger, nicest of all Brauti- 
 gamSj pleasantest, best, and certainly most charm- 
 ing, I don't think I'll write to you again in the 
 evenings. One of those hard clear hours that lie 
 round breakfast-time will be the most seemly for 
 consecration to you. Moods are such queer 
 things, each one so distinct and real, so seemingly 
 eternal, and I am influenced by them to an 
 extraordinary degree. The weather, the time of 
 day, the light in the room — yes, actually the 
 light in the room, sunlight, cloudlight, lamp- 
 light — the scent of certain flowers, the sound of 
 certain voices — the instant my senses become 
 aware of either of these things I find myself flung 
 into the middle of a fresh mood. And the worst 
 part of it is the blind enthusiasm with which 
 I am sure that as I think and feel at that moment 
 so will I think and feel for ever. Nothing cures 
 me. No taking of myself aside, no weight of 
 private admonishment, no bringing of my spirit 
 within the white glare of pure reason. Oh, 
 women are fools ; and of all fools the most com- 
 plete is myself But that's not what I want to 
 talk about. I want to say that 1 had to go to 
 
 33 D
 
 34 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 a Kaffec-Klatsch yesterday at four, which is why 
 1 put off answering your letter of the 13th till 
 the evening. My dear Roger, you must take 
 no notice of that letter. Pray think of me as 
 a young person of sobriety ; collected, discreet, 
 cold to frostiness. Think of me like that, my 
 dear, and in return I'll undertake to write to you 
 only in my after-breakfast mood, quite the most 
 respectable I possess. It is nine now. Papa, in 
 the slippers you can't have forgotten, is in his 
 corner by the stove, loudly disagreeing with the 
 morning paper ; he keeps on shouting Schafskopf. 
 Johanna is carrying coals about and dropping 
 them with a great noise. My stepmother is busy 
 telling her how wrong it is to drop dirty coals 
 in clean places. I am writing on a bit of the 
 breakfast- table, surrounded by crumbs and coffee- 
 cups. I will not clear them away till I've finished 
 my letter, because then I am sure you'll get 
 nothing either morbid or love-sick. Who, I'd like 
 to know, could flame into love-talk or sink into 
 the mud of morbidness from a starting-point of 
 anything so sprightly as crumbs and coffee-cups ? 
 It was too sweet of you to compare me to 
 Nausicaa in your letter yesterday. Nobody ever 
 did that before. Various aunts, among whom a 
 few years ago there was a great mortality, so that 
 they are all now aunts in heaven, told me in 
 divers tones that I was much too long for my 
 width, that I was like the handle of a broom, like 
 the steeple of the Stadtkirche^ like a tree walking ; 
 but none of them ever said anything about
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 35 
 
 Nausicaa. I doubt if they had ever heard of 
 her. I'm afraid if they had they wouldn't have 
 seen that I am like her. You know the blindness 
 of aunts. Jena is full of them (not mine, Gott set 
 Danky but other people's) and they are all stone- 
 bhnd. I don't mean, of course, that the Jena 
 streets are thick with aunts being led by dogs on 
 strings, but that they have that tragic blindness 
 of the spirit that misses seeing things that are 
 hopeful and generous and lovely ; things alight 
 with young enthusiasms, or beautiful with a 
 patience that has had time to grow grey. They 
 also have that odd, unfurnished sort of mind that 
 can never forget and never forgive. Yesterday 
 at the Kaffee-Klatsch 1 met them all again, the 
 Jena aunts I know so well and who are yet for 
 ever strange, for ever of a ghastly freshness. It 
 was the first this season, and now I suppose I 
 shall waste many a good afternoon klatsch'ing. 
 How I wish 1 had not to go. My stepmother 
 says that if I do not show myself 1 shall be put 
 down as eccentric. " You are not very popular," 
 says she, "as it is. Do not, therefore, make 
 matters worse." Then she appeals, should a 
 more than usual stubbornness cloud my open 
 countenance, to Papa. "Ferdinand," she says, 
 "shall she not, then, do as others of her age?" 
 And of course Papa says, bless him, that girls 
 must see life occasionally, and is quite unhappy 
 if 1 won't. Life ? God bless him for a dear, 
 innocent Papa. And how they talked yesterday. 
 Papa would have writhed. He never will talk
 
 36 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 or listen to talk about women unless they've 
 been dead some time, so uninteresting, so un- 
 worthy of discussion does he consider all live 
 females except Johanna to be. And if I hadn't 
 had my love-letter (I took it with me tucked 
 inside my dress, where my heart could beat 
 against it), I don't think 1 would have survived 
 that Klatsch. You've no idea how proudly I set 
 out. Hadn't I just been reading the sweetest 
 things about myself in your letter } Of course 
 I was proud. And I felt so important, and so 
 impressive, and simply gloriously good-tempered. 
 The pavement of Jena, I decided as I walked 
 over it, was quite unworthy to be touched by my 
 feet ; and if the passers-by only knew it, an 
 extremely valuable person was in their midst. 
 In fact, my dear Roger, I fancied myself yester- 
 day. Didn't Odysseus think Nausicaa was 
 Artemis when first he met her among the wash- 
 ing, so god-like did she appear ? Well, I felt 
 god-like yesterday, made god-like by your love. 
 1 actually fancied people would see something 
 wonderful had happened to me, that I was trans- 
 figured, verkldrt. Positively, I had a momentary 
 feeling that my coming in, the coming in of 
 anything so happy, must blind the Kaffee-Klatsch, 
 that anything so burning with love must scorch 
 it. Well, it didn't. Never did torch plunged 
 into wetness go out with a drearier fizzle than 
 did my little shining. Nobody noticed anything 
 different. Nobody seemed even to look at me. 
 A few careless hands were stretched out, and the
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 37 
 
 hostess told me to ask the servant to bring more 
 milk. 
 
 They were talking about sin. We don't sin 
 much in Jena, so generally they talk about 
 sick people, or their neighbour's income and 
 what he does with it. But yesterday they talked 
 sin. You know, because we are poor and Papa 
 has no official position and I have come to be 
 twenty-five without having found a husband, I 
 am a quantite negligeahle in our set, a being In 
 whose presence everything can be said, and who 
 is expected to sit in a draught if there is one. 
 Too old to join the young girls in the corner set 
 apart for them, where they whisper and giggle 
 and eat amazing quantities of whipped cream, 1 
 hover uneasily on the outskirts of the group of 
 the married, and try to ingratiate myself by 
 keeping on handing them cakes. It generally 
 ends in my being sent out every few minutes 
 by the hostess to the kitchen to fetch more food 
 and things. " Rose-Marie is so useful," she will 
 explain to the others when I have been extra 
 quick and cheerful ; but I don't suppose Nausicaa's 
 female acquaintances said more. The man Ulysses 
 might take her for a goddess, but the most the 
 women would do would be to commend the way 
 she did the washing. Sometimes I have great 
 trouble not to laugh v/hen I see their heads, often 
 quite venerable, gathered together in an eager 
 bunch, and hear them expressing horror, sympathy, 
 pity. In every sort of appropriate tone, while their 
 eyes, their tell-tale eyes, betrayers of the soul,
 
 38 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 look pleased. Why they should be pleased when 
 somebody has had an operation or doesn't pay 
 his debts, I can't make out. But they do. And 
 after a course of Klatsches throughout the winter, 
 you are left towards April with one firm convic- 
 tion in a world where everything else is shaky, 
 that there's not a single person who isn't either 
 extraordinarily ill, or, if he's not, who does not 
 misuse his health and strength by not p^iying his 
 servants' wages. 
 
 Yesterday the Klatsch was in a fearful flutter. 
 It had got hold of a tale of sin, real or suspected. 
 It was a tale of two people who, after leading 
 exemplary lives for years, had suddenly been 
 clutched by the throat by Nature ; and Nature, 
 we know, cares nothing at all for the claims of 
 husbands and wives or any other lawfulnesses, 
 and is a most unmoral and one-idea'd person. 
 They have, says Jena, begun to love each other 
 in defiance of the law. Nature has been too 
 many for them, I suppose. All Jena is a-twitter. 
 Nothing can be proved, but everything is being 
 feared, said the hostess ; from her eyes I'm afraid 
 she wanted to say hoped. Isn't it ugly .f* — pfii'h 
 as we say. And so stale, if it's true. Why can't 
 people defy Nature and be good } The only 
 thing that is always fresh and beautiful is good- 
 ness. It is also the only thing that can make 
 you go on being happy indefinitely. 
 
 I know her well. My heart failed me when 
 I heard her being talked about so hideously. 
 She is the nicest woman in Jena. She has been
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 39 
 
 kind to me often. She is very clever. Perhaps 
 if she had been more dull she would have found 
 no temptation to do anything but jog along re- 
 spectably — sometimes I think that to be without 
 imagination is to be so very safe. He has only 
 come to these parts lately. He used to be in 
 Berlin, and has been appointed to a very good 
 position in Weimar. I have not met him, but 
 Papa says he is brilliant. He has a wife, and she 
 has a husband, and they each have a lot of children ; 
 so you see if it's true it really is very pfiii. 
 
 Just as the Kaffee-Klatsch was on the wane, 
 and crumbs were being brushed off laps, and 
 bonnet-strings tied, in she walked. There was 
 a moment's dead silence. Then you should have 
 heard the effusion of welcoming speeches. The 
 hostess ran up and hugged her. The others 
 were covered with pleasant smiles. Perhaps they 
 were grateful to her for having provided such 
 thrilling talk. When I had to go and kiss her 
 hand I never in my life felt baser. You should 
 have seen her looking round cheerfully at all the 
 Judases, and saying she was sorry to be late, and 
 asking if they hadn't missed her ; and you should 
 have heard the eager chorus of assurances. 
 
 Oh, pfiii, pfni. 
 
 R.-M. 
 
 Plow much I love goodness, straightncss, 
 singleness of heart — you. 
 
 Later. 
 
 I walked part of the way home with the
 
 40 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 calumniated one. Flow charminc: she is. Dear 
 little lady, it would be difficult not to love her. 
 She talked delightfully about German and English 
 poetry. Do you think one can talk delightfully 
 about German and English poetry and yet be a 
 sinner ? Tell me, do you think a woman who is 
 very intellectual, but very, 'uery Intellectual, could 
 yet be a sinner ? Would not her wits save her ? 
 Would not her bright wits save her from anything 
 so dull as sin I
 
 IX 
 
 Jena, Nov. iS. 
 
 Dearest, — I don't think I like that girl at all. 
 Your letter from Clinches has just come, and I 
 don't think I like her at all. What is more, I 
 don't think I ever shall like her. And what is 
 still more, I don't think I even want to. So your 
 idea of her being a good friend to me later on in 
 London must retire to that draughty corner ot 
 space where abortive ideas are left to eternal 
 shivering. I'm sorry if 1 am offensively indepen- 
 dent. But then I know so well that I won't be 
 lonely if I'm with you, and I think rooting up, 
 which you speak of as a difficult and probably 
 painful process, must be very nice if you are the 
 one to do it, and I am sure I could never by any 
 possibility reach such depths of strangeness and 
 doubt about what to do next as would induce me 
 to stretch out appealing hands to a young woman 
 with eyes that, as you put it, tilt at the corners. 
 I wish you hadn't told her about us, about me. 
 It has profaned things so, dragged them out into 
 the streets, cheapened them. 1 don't in the least 
 want to tell my father, or any one else. Does 
 this sound as though I were angry ? Well, I 
 don't think I am. On the contrary, 1 rather want
 
 42 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 to laugh. You dear silly ! So clever and so 
 simple, so wise and crammed with learning, and 
 such a dear, ineffable goose. How old am I, I 
 wonder ? Only as old as you ? Really only as 
 old ? Nonsense : I'm fifteen, twenty years your 
 senior, my dear sir. I've lived in Jena, you in 
 London. I frequent Kaffee-Klatsches, and you the 
 great world. I talk much with Johanna in the 
 kitchen, and you with Heaven knows what in 
 the way of geniuses. Yet no male Nancy Cheri- 
 ton, were his eyelids never so tilted, would wring 
 a word out of me about a thing so near, so 
 precious, so much soul of my soul as my lover. 
 
 How would you explain this ? I've tried and 
 can't. 
 
 Your rebellious 
 
 Rose-Marie. 
 
 Darling, darling, don't ask me to like Nancy. 
 The thing's unthinkable. 
 
 Later. 
 
 Now I know why I am wiser than you : life 
 in kitchens and Klatsches turns the soul grey very 
 early. Didn't one of your poets sing of some- 
 body who had a sad lucidity of soul ? I'm afraid 
 that is what's the matter with me.
 
 Jena, Nov. 19. 
 
 Oh, what nonsense everything seems, — everything 
 of the nature of differences, of arguments, on a 
 clear morning up among the hills. I am ashamed 
 of what I wrote about Nancy ; ashamed of my 
 eagerness and heat about a thing that does not 
 matter. On the hills this morning, as I was 
 walking in the sunshine, it seemed to me that I 
 met God. And He took me by the hand, and 
 let me walk with Him. And He showed me 
 how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the 
 background He has given us, the spacious, splendid 
 background on which to paint our large charities 
 and loves. And 1 looked across the hilltops, 
 golden, utterly peaceful, and amazement filled me 
 in the presence of that great calm at the way 1 
 flutter through my days and at the noise I make. 
 Why should I cry out before I am hurt ? flare up 
 into heat and clamour ? The pure light up there 
 made it easy to see clearly, and I saw that 1 have 
 been silly and ungrateful. Forgive me. You 
 know best about Nancy, you who have seen her ; 
 and I, just come down from that holy hour on 
 the hills, am very willing to love her. I will not 
 turn my back upon a ready friend. She can have 
 
 43
 
 44 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 no motive but a good one. Roger, I am a 
 blunderer, a clumsy creature with not one of my 
 elemental passions bound down yet into the decent 
 listlessness of chains. But I shall grow better, 
 grow more worthy of you. Not a day shall pass 
 without my having been a little wiser than the 
 day before, a little kinder, a little more patient. 
 I wish you had been with me this morning. It 
 was so still and the sky so clear that I sat on the 
 old last year's grass as warmly as in summer. I 
 felt irradiated with life and love ; light shining 
 on to every tiresome incident of life and turning 
 it into beauty, love for the whole wonderful world, 
 and all the people in it, and all the beasts and 
 flowers, and all the happy living things. Indeed, 
 blessings have been given me in full measure, 
 pressed down and running over. In the whole 
 of that little town at my feet, so quiet, so bathed 
 in lovely light, there was not, there could not be, 
 another being so happy as myself. Surely I am 
 far too happy to grudge accepting a kindness ? I 
 tell you I marvel at the energy of my protest 
 yesterday. Perhaps it was — oh, Roger, after 
 those hours on the hills I will be honest, I will 
 pull off the veil from feelings that the female 
 mind generally refuses to uncover — perhaps the 
 real reason, the real, pitiful, mean reason was that 
 I felt sure somehow from your description of her 
 that Nancy's Mouses must be very perfect things, 
 things beyond words very perfect. And I was 
 jealous of her blouses. There now. Good-bye.
 
 XI 
 
 Jena, Nov. 20. 
 
 I AM glad you. did not laugh at that silly letter 
 of mine about scorching in the sun on rocks. 
 Indeed, I gather, my dear Roger, that you liked it. 
 Make the most of it, then, for there will be no 
 more of the sort. A decent woman never gets on 
 to rocks, and if she scorches she doesn't say so. 
 And I believe that it is held to be generally desir- 
 able that she should not, even under really trying 
 circumstances, part with her dignity. I rather 
 think the principle was originally laid down by 
 the husband of an attractive wife, but it is a good 
 one, and so long as 1 am busy clinging to my 
 dignity obviously I shall have no leisure for cling- 
 ing to you, and then you will not be suffocated 
 with the superabundance of my follies. 
 
 About those two sinners who are appalling us : 
 how can I agree with you ? To do so would cut 
 away the ground from under my own feet. The 
 woman plays such a losing game. She gives so 
 much, and gets so little. So long as the man 
 loves her I do see that he is worth the good 
 opinion of neighbours and relations, which is one 
 of the chilliest things in the world ; but he never 
 seems able to go on loving her once she has begun 
 
 45
 
 46 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 to wither. That is very odd. She does not 
 mind his withering. And has she not a soul ? 
 And does not that grow always lovelier } But 
 what, then, becomes of her } For wither she 
 certainly will, and years rush past at such a terrific 
 pace that almost before she has begun to be happy 
 it is over. He goes back to his wife, a person 
 who has been either patient or bitter, according to 
 the quantity of her vitality and the quality of her 
 personal interests, and concludes, while he watches 
 her sewing on his buttons in the corner she has 
 probably been sitting in through all his vagrant 
 years, that marriage has its uses, and that it is 
 good to know there will be some one bound to 
 take care of you up to the last, and who will shed 
 decent tears when you are buried. She goes back 
 — but where, and to what ? They have gone 
 long ago, her husband, her children, her friends. 
 And she is old, and alone. You too, like every- 
 body else, seem unable to remember how transient 
 things are. Time goes, emotions wear out. 
 You say these people are in the hands of Fate, and 
 can no more get out of them and do differently 
 than a fly in a web can walk away when it sees the 
 hungry spider coming nearer. I don't believe 
 in webs and spiders ; at least, I don't to-day. 
 To-day I believe only in my unconquerable 
 soul — 
 
 I am the master of my fate, 
 I am the captain of my soul. 
 
 And you say that a person in the grip of a great
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 47 
 
 feeling should not care a straw for circumstance, 
 should defy it, trample it under foot. Heaven 
 knows that I too am for love and laughter, for the 
 snatching of flying opportunities, for all that 
 makes the light and the glory of life ; but what 
 afterwards ? The Afterwards haunts me like a 
 weeping ghost. It is true, there is still the wide 
 world, the warm sun, seed-time and harvest, 
 Shakespeare, the Book of Job, singing birds, 
 flowers ; but the soul that has transgressed the 
 laws of man seems for ever afterwards unable to 
 use the gifts of God. If supreme joy could be 
 rounded off by death, death at the exact right 
 moment, how easy things would be. Only death 
 has a strange way of shunning those persons who 
 want him most. To long to die seems to make 
 you as nearly immortal as it is possible to become. 
 Now, just think what would have happened if 
 Tristan had not been killed, had lived on quite 
 healthily. King Mark, than whom I know no 
 man in literature more polite, would have handed 
 Isolde over to him as he declared himself ready to 
 have done had he been aware of the unfortunately 
 complicated state of things, and he would have 
 done it with every expression of decent regret at 
 the inconvenience he had caused. Isolde would 
 have married Tristan. There would have been 
 no philosophy, no divine hours in the garden, no 
 acute, exquisite anguish of love and sorrow. But 
 there would presently have been the Middle Ages 
 equivalent for a perambulator, a contented Tristan 
 coming to meet it, a faded Isolde who did not
 
 48 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 care for poetry admonishing, perhaps with sharp- 
 ness, a mediaeval nursemaid, and quite quickly 
 afterwards a Tristan grown too comfortable to 
 move, and an Isolde with wrinkles. Would we 
 not have lost a great deal if they had lived ? It 
 is certain that they themselves would have lost a 
 great deal ; for I don't see that contentment 
 beaten out thin enough to cover a long life — and 
 beat as thin as you will, it never does cover quite 
 across the years — is to be compared with one 
 supreme contentment heaped in one heap on the 
 highest, keenest point of living we reach. Now, 
 I am apparently arguing on your side, but I'm 
 not really, because you, you know, think of love 
 as a perpetual crescendo^ and I, though I do hear 
 the crescendo and follow it with a joyful clapping 
 of hands up to the very top of its splendour, can 
 never forget the drop on the other side, the in- 
 evitable diminuendo to the dead level — and then ? 
 Why, the rest is not even silence, but a querulous 
 murmur, a querulous, confused whining, confused 
 complaining, not very loud, not very definite, but 
 always there till the last chord is reached a long 
 time afterwards — that satisfactory common chord 
 of death. My point is, that if you want to let 
 yourself go to great emotions you ought to have 
 the luck to die at an interesting: moment. The 
 alternative makes such a dreary picture ; and it is 
 the picture I always see when I hear of love at 
 defiance with the law. The law wins ; always, 
 inevitably. Husbands are best ; always, inevit- 
 ably. Really, the most unsatisfactory husband i?
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 49 
 
 a person who should be clung to steadily from 
 beginning to end, for did not one marry him of 
 one's own free will ? How ugly then, because 
 one had been hasty, foolish, unacquainted with 
 one's usually quite worthless mind, to punish him. 
 The brilliant professor, the fascinating little lady, 
 what are they but grossly selfish people, cruelly 
 punishing the husband and wife who had the mis- 
 fortune to marry them ? Oh, it's a mercy most 
 of us are homely, slow of wit, heavy of foot ; for 
 so at least we stay at home and find our peace in 
 fearful innocence and household laws. (Please 
 note my familiarity with the British poets.) But 
 isn't that a picture of frugal happiness, of the 
 happiness that comes from a daily simple obedi- 
 ence to the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, 
 beside which stormy, tremendous, brief things 
 come off very badly .'' I don't believe you do in 
 your heart side with the two sinners. Bother 
 them. They have made me feel like a Lutheran 
 pastor on a Sunday afternoon. But you know 
 I love you. 
 
 R.-M.
 
 XII 
 
 Jena, Nov. 22. 
 
 When do you go back to Jermyn Street? 
 Surely to-day, for is not the examination to- 
 morrow ? Your description of the Cheriton 
 menage at Clinches is like fairyland. No wonder 
 you feel so happy there. My mother used to 
 tell me about life in England, but apparently the 
 Watson family did not dwell in houses like 
 Clinches. Anyhow, I had an impression of little 
 houses with little staircases, and oilcloth, and a 
 servant in a cap with streamers, and round white 
 balls of suet with currants in them very often for 
 dinner. But Clinches, beautiful and dignified in 
 the mists and subtleties of a November afternoon, 
 its massed greyness melting into that other grey- 
 ness, its setting of mysterious blurred wood and 
 pale light of water, it spaciousness, its pleasant 
 people, its daughter with the dusky hair and odd 
 grey eyes — is a vision of fairyland. I cannot 
 conceive what life is like in such places ; nor, I 
 am sure, could any other inhabitant of Jena. 
 What, for instance, can it be like to live in a 
 thing so big that you do not hear the sounds nor 
 smell the smells of the kitchen ? Ought not 
 people who live in such places to have unusually 
 
 50
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 51 
 
 beautiful ways of looking at life ? of thinking ? of 
 speaking ? One imagines it all very noble, very 
 gracious, altogether worthy. That complete separa- 
 tion from the kitchen is what wrings the biggest 
 sigh of envy out of me. Is it my English blood 
 that makes me rebel against kitchens ? Or is it 
 only my unfortunate sensitiveness to smell } I 
 wish 1 had no nose. It has always been a 
 nuisance. It is as extravagantly delighted by 
 exquisite scents as it is extravagantly horrified 
 by nasty ones. Why, a beautiful smell, if it is 
 delicate, subtle, intermittent, can ruin a morning 
 for me. It fills me with a quite unworthy rapture. 
 Things that ought to be hard in me melt. Things 
 that ought to be fixed are scattered Heaven knows 
 where. I go soft, ecstatic, basely idle. I forget 
 that my business is to get dinner, and not to 
 stand still and just sniff. In March I dare not 
 pass the house Schiller used to live in on my way 
 to market, because the people who live there now 
 have planted violets along the railings. It is the 
 shortest way, and it takes ten more minutes out 
 of a busy morning to go round by the Post 
 Office ; but really for a grown woman to stand 
 lost in what is mere voluptuous pleasure, leaning 
 against somebody else's railing while the family 
 dinner lies still unbought in the market-place, is 
 conduct that 1 cannot justify. As for a bcanficld 
 — my dear Roger, did you ever come across a 
 beantield in flower ? It is the divincst experience 
 the nose can give us. Two years ago an English- 
 man came and spent a spring and summer in the
 
 52 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 little house in the apple orchard up on the road 
 over the Galgenberg — the little house with the 
 blue shutters — and he was a great gardener. And 
 he dug a big patch, and planted a beanfield, and 
 it was the first beanfield Jena had ever seen ; for 
 those beans called broad that you eat in England 
 and are properly thankful for are only grown in 
 Germany for the use of pigs, and there are no 
 pigs in Jena. Sow-beans they are called here, 
 mindful of their destiny. The Englishman, who 
 possessed no visible sow, was a source of astonish- 
 ment to us. The things came up, and were 
 undoubtedly sow-beans. A great square patch of 
 them grew up just over the fence on which Jena 
 leaned and pondered. The man himself was seen 
 in his shirt-sleeves weeding them on rainy after- 
 noons. Jena could only suspect a pig concealed 
 in the parlour, and was indulgent ; and it was 
 indulgent because no one, in its opinion, can be 
 both English and sane. " God made us all," 
 was its invariable helpless conclusion as it went, 
 shaking its head, home down the hill. When in 
 June the beanfield flowered I blessed that English- 
 man. No one hung over his fence more per- 
 sistently than I. It was the first time I had smelt 
 the like. It became an obsession. I wanted to 
 be there at every sort of time and under every 
 sort of weather-condition. At noon, when the 
 sun shone straight down on it, drawing up its 
 perfume in hot breaths, I was there ; in the 
 morning, so early that it was still in the blue 
 shadow of the Galgenberg and every grey leaf
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 53 
 
 and white petal was drenched with dew, I was 
 there ; on wet afternoons, when the scent was 
 crushed out of it by the beating of heavy rain, 
 and the road for half a mile, the slippery clay 
 road with its puddles and amazing mud, was 
 turned into a bath of fragrance fit for the 
 tenderest, most fastidious goddess to bare her 
 darling little limbs in, I was there ; and once, after 
 lying awake in my hot room so near the roof for 
 hours thinkinor of it out there on the hillside in 
 the freshness under the stars, I got up and 
 dressed, and crept with infinite caution past my 
 stepmother's door, and stole the latchkey, and 
 slunk, my heart in my mouth, through the stale 
 streets, along all the railings and dusty front 
 gardens, out into the open country, up on to the 
 hill, to where it stood in straight and motionless 
 rows, sending out waves of fragrance into that 
 wonderful clean air you find in all the places 
 where men leave off and God begins. Did you 
 ever know a woman before who risked her 
 reputation for a beanfield ? Well, it is what 
 1 did. And I'll tell you, I who am so 
 incurably honest that I can never for long 
 pretend, why I write all this about it. It is that 
 I am sick with anxiety — oh, sick, cold, shivering 
 with it — about your exam. I didn't want you to 
 know. I've tried to write of beanficlds instead. 
 I didn't want you to be bothered. The clamour- 
 ings for news of the person not on the spot are 
 always a worry, and I did not want to worry. 
 But the letter I got from you this morning never
 
 54 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 mentions the exam., the thing on which, as you 
 told me, everything depends for us. You talk 
 about Clinches, about the people there, about the 
 shooting, the long days in woods, the keen-witted- 
 ness of Nancy who goes with you, who under- 
 stands before you have spoken, who sympathizes 
 so kindly about me, who fits, you say, so strangely 
 into the misty winter landscape in her paleness, 
 her thinness, her spiritualness. There was one 
 whole page — oh, I grudged it — about her loosely 
 done dark hair, how softly dusky it is, how it 
 makes you think of twilight, and her eyes beneath 
 it of the first faint shining of stars. 1 wonder if 
 these things really fill your thoughts, or whether 
 you are only using them to drive away useless 
 worry about Saturday. I know you are a poet, 
 and a poet's pleasure in eyes and hair is not a 
 very personal thing, so I do not mind that. But 
 to-morrow is Saturday. Shall you send me a 
 telegram, I wonder ^ A week ago I would not 
 have wondered ; I should have been so sure you 
 would let me have one little word at once about 
 how you felt it had gone off — one little word for 
 the person so far away, so helpless, so dependent 
 on your kindness for the very power to go on 
 living. Oh, what stuff this is. Worse even than 
 the beanfield. But I must be sentimental some- 
 times, now mustn't I ? or I would not be a 
 woman. But really, my darling, I am very 
 anxious, 
 
 R.-M.
 
 XIII 
 
 Jena, Nov. 23. 
 
 I HAVE waited all day, and there has been no 
 telegram. Well, on Monday I shall get a letter 
 about it, and how much more satisfactory that is. 
 To-day after all is nearly over, and there is only 
 Sunday to be got through first, and I shall be 
 helped to endure that by the looking forward. 
 Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being 
 expectant ? It makes life so bearable. However 
 regularly we are disappointed and nothing what- 
 ever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after 
 the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of 
 misery, we turn our eyes with all their old 
 eagerness to a point a little further along the 
 road. I suppose in time the regular repetition of 
 shocks does wear out hope, and then I imagine 
 one's youth collapses like a house of cards. Real 
 old age begins then, inward as well as outward ; 
 and one's soul, that kept so bravely young for 
 years after one's face got its first wrinkles, 
 suddenly shrivels up. Its light goes out. It is 
 suddenly and irrecoverably old, blank, dark, 
 indifferent. 
 
 Sunday Night, 
 
 1 didn't finish my letter last night because, 
 
 55
 
 56 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTIIER 
 
 observing the strain I had got into, I thought it 
 better for your comfort that I should go to bed. 
 So I did. And while I went there I asked myself 
 why I should burden you with the dull weight of 
 my elementary reflections. You who are so 
 clever and who think so much and so clearly, 
 must laugh at their elementariness. They are 
 green and immature, the acid juice of an imper- 
 fect fruit that has always hung in the shadow. 
 And yet I don't think you must laugh, Roger. 
 It would, after all, be as cruel as the laughter of 
 a child watching a blind man ridiculously stum- 
 bling among the difficulties of the way. 
 
 The one Sunday post brought nothing from 
 you. The day has been very long. I cannot 
 tell you how glad I am night has come, and only 
 sleep separates me now from Monday morning's 
 letter. These Sundays now that you are gone 
 are intolerable. Before you came they rather 
 amused me, — the furious raging of Saturday, with 
 its extra cleaning and feverish preparations till far 
 into the night ; Johanna more than usually slip- 
 shod all day,fed of elbow, wispy of hair, shuffling 
 about in her felt slippers, her skirt girded up 
 very high, a moist mop and an overflowing pail 
 dribbling soapy tracks behind her in her progress ; 
 my stepmother baking, and not lightly to be 
 approached ; Papa fled from early morning till 
 supper-time ; and then the dead calm of Sunday, 
 day of food and sleep. Cake for breakfast — such 
 a bad beginning. Church in the University 
 chapel, with my stepmother in her best hat with
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 57 
 
 the black feathers and the pink rose — It sounds 
 frivolous, but you must have noticed the awe- 
 inspiring effect of it coming so unexpectedly on 
 the top of her long respectable face and oiled- 
 down hair. A fluffy person in that hat would 
 have all the students offering to take her for a 
 walk or share their umbrella with her. My 
 stepmother stalks along panoplied in her excel- 
 lences, and the feather waves and nods gaily at 
 the passing student as he slinks away down by- 
 streets. Once last spring a silly bee thought the 
 rose must be something alive and honeytul, and 
 went and smelt it. I think it must have been a 
 very young bee ; anyhow, nobody else up to now 
 has misjudged my stepmother like that. She sits 
 near the door in church, and has never yet heard 
 the last half of the sermon because she has to go 
 out in time to put the goose or other Sunday 
 succulence safely into the oven. I wish she 
 would let me do that, for I don't care for 
 sermons. When you were here and conde- 
 scended to come with us, at least we could 
 criticize them comfortably on our way home ; 
 but alone with my stepmother I may do nothing 
 but praise. It is the most tiring, tiresome 
 of all attitudes, the one of undiscriminating 
 admiration. To hear you pull the person who 
 had preached to pieces, and laugh at the things 
 he had said that would not bear examination, 
 used to be like having a window thrown open in 
 a stuffy room on a clear winter's morning. Shall 
 you ever forget the elaborateness of the Sunday
 
 58 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 dinner ? For that, chiefly, is Saturday sacrificed, 
 a whole day that might be filled with lovely 
 leisure. I do hope you never thought that I too 
 looked upon it as a nice way of celebrating 
 Sunday. How amazing it is, the way women 
 waste life. Men waste enough of it, Heaven 
 knows, but never anything like so much as 
 women. Papa and I both hate that Sunday 
 dinner, both dread the upheavals of Saturday 
 made necessary by it, and you, I know, disliked 
 them just as much, and so has every other young 
 man we have had here ; yet my stepmother 
 inflicts these things on us with an iron deter- 
 mination that nothing will ever alter. And why ? 
 Only because she was brought up in the belief 
 that it was proper, and because, if she omitted to 
 do the proper, female Jena would be aghast. 
 Well, I think it's a bad thing to be what is known 
 as brought up, don't you ? Why should we poor 
 helpless little children, all soft and resistless, be 
 squeezed and jammed into the rusty iron bands 
 of parental points of view .'' Why should we 
 have to have points of view at all ? Why not, for 
 those few divine years when we are still so near 
 God, leave us just to guess and wonder ? We 
 are not given a chance. On our pulpy little 
 minds our parents carve their opinions, and the 
 mass slowly hardens, and all those deep, narrow, 
 up and down strokes harden with it, and the first 
 thing the best of us have to do on growing up is 
 to waste precious time rubbing and beating at the 
 things to try to get them out. Surely the child
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 59 
 
 of the most admirable, wise parent is richer with 
 his own faulty but original point of view than he 
 would be fitted out with the choicest selection of 
 maxims and conclusions that he did not have to 
 think out for himself? I could never be a 
 schoolmistress. I should be afraid to teach the 
 children. They know more than I do. They 
 know how to be happy, how to live from day to 
 day in godlike indifference to what may come 
 next. And is not how to be happy the secret we 
 spend our lives trying to guess .? Why then 
 should I, by forcing them to look through my 
 stale eyes, show them as through a dreadful 
 magnifying-glass the terrific possibilities, the cruel 
 explosiveness of what they had been lightly tossing 
 to each other across the daisies and thinking were 
 only toys ! 
 
 To-day at dinner, when Papa had got to the 
 stage immediately following the first course at 
 which, his hunger satisfied, he begins to fidget 
 and grow more and more unhappy, and my step- 
 mother was conversing blandly but firmly with 
 the tried and ancient friend she invites to bear 
 witness that we too have a goose on Sundays, and 
 I had begun to droop, I hope poetically, like a 
 thirsty flower, let us say, or a broken lily, over 
 my plate, 1 thought — oh, how longingly I thought 
 — of the happy past meals, made happy because 
 you were here sitting opposite me and I could 
 watch you. How short they seemed in those 
 days. You didn't know I was watching you, did 
 you ? But I was. And I learned to do it so
 
 6o FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 artfully, so cautiously. When you turned your 
 head and talked to Papa I could do it openly ; 
 when you talked to me I could look straight in 
 your dear eyes while I answered ; but when I 
 wasn't answering I still looked at you, by devious 
 routes carefully concealed, routes that grew so 
 familiar by practice that at last I never missed a 
 single expression, while you, I suppose, imagined 
 you had nothing before you but a young woman 
 with a vacant face. What talks and laughs we 
 will have about that odd, foolish year we spent 
 here together in our blindness when next we 
 meet 1 We've had no time to say anything at 
 all yet. There are thousands of things I want to 
 ask you about, thousands of little things we said 
 and did that seem so strange now in the light of 
 our acknowledged love. My heart stands still at 
 the thought of when next we meet. These letters 
 have been so intimate, and we were not intimate. 
 I shall be deadly shy when in your presence 1 
 remember what I have written and what you have 
 written. We are still such strangers, bodily, 
 personally ; strangers with the overwhelming 
 memory of that last hour together to make us 
 turn hot and tremble. 
 
 Now I am going to bed, — to dream of you, 
 I suppose, considering that all day long I am 
 thinking of you ; and perhaps I shall have a little 
 luck, and dream that 1 hear you speaking. You 
 know, Roger, I love you for all sorts of queer 
 and apparently inadequate reasons — I won't tell 
 you what they are, for they are quite absurd ;
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 6i 
 
 things that have to do with eyebrows, and the 
 shape of hands, so you see quite foolish things — 
 but most of all I love you for your voice. A 
 beautiful speaking voice is one of the best of the 
 gifts of the gods. It is so rare ; and it is so 
 irresistible. Papa says heaps of nice poetic things, 
 but then the darling pipes. The most eloquent 
 lecturer we have here does all his eloquence, which 
 is really very great read afterwards in print, in a 
 voice of beer, loose, throaty, reminiscent of barrels. 
 Not one of the preachers who come to the 
 University chapel has a voice that does not spoil 
 the merit there may be in what he says. Some- 
 times I think that if a man with the right voice 
 were to get up in that pulpit and just say, 
 " Children, Christ died for you," — oh, then I 
 think that all I have and am, body, mind, soul, 
 would be struck into one great passion of grate- 
 fulness and love, and that 1 would fall conquered 
 on my face before the Cross on the altar, and cry 
 and cry. , , •
 
 XIV 
 
 Jena, Nov. 25. Monday Night. 
 
 The last post has been. No letter. If you 
 
 had posted it in London on Saturday after the 
 
 examination I ought to have had it by now. I 
 
 am tortured by the fear that something has 
 
 happened to you. Such dreadful things do 
 
 happen. Those great, blundering, blind fists of 
 
 Fate, laying about in mechanical cruelty, crushing 
 
 the most precious lives as indifferently as we 
 
 crush an ant in an afternoon walk, how they 
 
 terrify me. All day I have been seeing foolish, 
 
 horrible pictures — your train to London smashing 
 
 up, your cab coming to grief — the thousand 
 
 things that might so easily happen really doing 
 
 it at last. I sent my two letters to Jermyn Street, 
 
 supposing you would have left Clinches, but now 
 
 somehow 1 don't think you did leave it, but went 
 
 up from there for the exam. Do you know it is 
 
 three days since I heard from you ? That 
 
 wouldn't matter so much — for I am determined 
 
 never to bother you to write, I am determined 
 
 I will never be an exacting woman — if it were not 
 
 for the all-important examination. You said that 
 
 if you passed it well and got a good place in the 
 
 62
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 63 
 
 Foreign Office you would feel justified in telling 
 your father about us. That means that we would 
 be openly engaged. Not that I care for that, or 
 want it except as the next step to our meeting 
 again. It is clear that we cannot meet again till 
 our engagement is known. Even if you could 
 get away and come over for a few days I would 
 not see you. I will not be kissed behind doors. 
 These things are too wonderful to be handled 
 after the manner of kitchen-maids. I am willing 
 to be as silent as the grave for as long as you 
 choose, but so long as I am silent we shall not 
 meet. I tell you I am incurably honest. I cannot 
 bear to lie. And even these letters, this perpetual 
 writing when no one is likely to look, this per- 
 petual watching for the postman so that no one 
 will be likely to see, does not make me love 
 myself any better. It is true, I need not have 
 watched quite so carefully lately, need I ? Oh, 
 Roger, why don't you write ? What has hap- 
 pened ? Think of my wretched plight if you are 
 ill. Just left to wonder at the silence, to gnaw 
 away at my miserable heart. Or, if some one 
 took pity on me and sent me word, — your 
 servant, or the doctor, or the kind Nancy — what 
 could I do even then but still sit here and wait ? 
 How could I, a person of whom nobody has heard, 
 go to you ? It seems to me that the whole world 
 has a right to be with you, to know about you, 
 except myself I cannot wait for the next post. 
 The waiting for these posts makes me feel 
 physically sick. If the man is a little late, what
 
 64 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 torments I suffer lest he should not be coming 
 at all. Then 1 hear him trudging up the stairs. 
 I fly to the door, absolutely vainly trying to choke 
 down hope. " There will be no letter, no letter, 
 no letter," I keep on crying to my thumping 
 heart so that the disappointment shall not be quite 
 so bitter ; and it takes no notice, but thumps 
 back wildly, "Oh, there will, there will." And 
 what the man gives me is a circular for Papa. 
 
 It is quite absurd, madly absurd, the anguish 
 I feel when that happens. My one wish, my only 
 wish, as I creep back again down the passage to 
 my work, is that I could go to sleep, and sleep 
 and sleep and forget that 1 have ever hoped for 
 anything ; sleep for years, and wake up quiet and 
 old, with all these passionate, tearing feelings gone 
 from me for ever,
 
 XV 
 
 Jena, Nov, 28. 
 
 Last night I got your letter written on Sunday 
 at Clinches, a place from which letters do not 
 seem to depart easily. My knowledge of Eng- 
 land's geography is limited, so how could I guess 
 that it was so easy to go up to London from 
 there for the exam, and back again the same day ? 
 As you had no time, you say, to go to Jermyn 
 Street, I suppose the two letters I sent there will 
 be forwarded to you. If they are not it does not 
 matter. They were only a string of little trivial 
 things that would look really quite too little and 
 trivial to be worth reading in the magnificence of 
 Clinches. I am glad you are well ; glad you are 
 happy ; glad you feel you did not do badly on 
 Saturday. It is a good thing to be well and 
 happy and satisfied, and a pleasant thing to have 
 found a friend who takes so much interest in you, 
 and to whom you can tell your most sacred 
 thoughts : doubly pleasant, of course, when the 
 friend chances to be a woman, and she is pretty, 
 and young, and rich, and everything else that is 
 suitable and desirable. The world is an amusing 
 place. My stepmother talked of you this morn- 
 ing at breakfast. She was, it seems, in a prophetic 
 
 65 F
 
 66 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 mood. She shook her head after the manner of 
 the more gloomy of the prophets, and hoped you 
 would steer clear of entanglements. 
 
 " And why should he not, meine Liebste ? " 
 inquired Papa. 
 
 " Not for nothing has he got that mouth, 
 Ferdinand," answered she. 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XVI 
 
 Jena, Nov. 29. 
 
 My darling, forgive me. If I could only get 
 it back ! I who hate unreasonableness, who hate 
 bitterness, who hate exacting women, petty women, 
 jealous women, to write a thing so angry. How 
 horrible this letter-writing is. If I had said all 
 that to you in a sudden flare of wrath, I would 
 have been sorry so immediately, and at once have 
 made everything fair and sweet again with a kiss. 
 And I never would have got beyond the first 
 words, never have reached my stepmother's silly 
 and rude remarks, never have dreamed of repeat- 
 ing the unkind, unjust things. Now, Roger, 
 listen to me : my faith in you is perfect, my love 
 for you is perfect, but I am so undisciplined, so 
 new to love, that you must be patient, you must 
 be ready to forgive easily for a little while, till I 
 have had time to grow wise. Just think, when 
 you feel irritated, of the circumstances of my life. 
 Everything has come so easily, so naturally to 
 you. But I have been always poor, always second- 
 rate — oh, it's true — shut out from the best things 
 and people, lonely because the society I could 
 have was too little worth having, and the society 
 I would have liked didn't want me. How could 
 it .? It never came our way, never even knew we 
 
 were there. I have had a shabby, restricted, 
 
 67
 
 68 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 incomplete life ; I mean the last ten years of it, 
 since my father married again. Before that, if the 
 shabbiness was there I did not see it ; there seemed 
 to be sunshine every day, and room to breathe, and 
 laughter enough ; but then I was a child, and saw 
 sunshine everywhere. Is there not much excuse 
 for some one who has found a treasure, some one 
 till then very needy, if his anxiety lest he should 
 be robbed makes him — irritable ^ You see, I 
 put it mildly. I know very well that irritable 
 isn't the right word. I know very well what are 
 the right words, and how horrid they are, and 
 how much ashamed I am of their bitter truth. 
 Pity me. A person so unbalanced, so stripped of 
 all self-control that she writes things she knows 
 must hurt to the being she loves so utterly, docs 
 deserve pity from better, serener natures. I do 
 not understand you yet. I do not understand 
 the ways yet of people who live as you do. I am 
 socially inferior, and therefore sensitive and sus- 
 picious, 1 am groping about, and am so blind 
 that only sometimes can 1 dimly feel how dark it 
 really is. I have built up a set of ideals about 
 love and lovers, absurd crude things, clumsy 
 fabrics suited to the conditions of Rauchgasse, and 
 the first time you do not exactly fit them I am 
 desperately certain that the world is coming to an 
 end. But how hopeless it is, this trying to 
 explain, this trying to undo. How shall I live 
 till you write that you do still love me ? 
 
 Your wretched 
 
 Rose-Marie.
 
 XVII 
 
 Jena, Nov. 30. 
 
 I COUNTED up my money this morning to see 
 if there would be enough to take me to England, 
 supposing some day I should wake up and find 
 myself no longer able to bear the silence. I know 
 I should be mad if I went, but sometimes one is 
 mad. There was not nearly enough. The 
 cheapest route would cost more than comes in 
 my way during a year. I have a ring of my 
 mother's with a diamond in it, my only treasure, 
 that I might sell. I never wear it ; my red hands 
 are not pretty enough for rings, so it is only 
 sentiment that makes it precious. And if it would 
 take me to you and give me just one half-hour's 
 talk with you and sweep away the icy fog that 
 seems to be settling down on my soul and shut- 
 ting out everything that is wholesome and sweet, 
 I am sure my darling mother, whose one thought 
 was always to make me happy, would say, " Child, 
 go and sell it, and buy peace." 
 
 69
 
 XVIII 
 
 Jena, Dec. i. 
 
 Last night I dreamed I did go to England, 
 and I found you in a room with a crowd of 
 people, and you nodded not unkindly, and went 
 on talking to the others, and I waited in my 
 corner till they should have gone, waited for the 
 moment when we would run into each other's 
 arms ; and with the last group you too went out 
 talking and laughing, and did not come back 
 again. It was not that you wanted to avoid me ; 
 you had simply forgotten that I was there. And 
 I crept out into the street, and it was raining, and 
 through the rain I made my way back across 
 Europe to my home, to the one place where they 
 would not shut me out, and when I opened the 
 door all the empty future years were waiting for 
 me there, grey, vacant, listless. 
 
 70
 
 XIX 
 
 Jena, Dec. 2. 
 
 These scraps of letters are not worth the post- 
 man's trouble, are not worth the stamps ; but if 
 I did not talk to you a little every day I do not 
 think I could live. Yesterday you got my angry 
 letter. If you were not at Clinches I could have 
 had an answer to-morrow ; as it is, I must wait 
 till Wednesday. Roger, I am really a cheerful 
 person. You mustn't suppose that it is my habit 
 to be so dreary. I don't know what has come 
 over me. Every day I send you another shred 
 of gloom, and deepen the wrong impression you 
 must be getting of me. I know very well that 
 nobody likes to listen to sighs, and that no man 
 can possibly go on for long loving a dreary 
 woman. Yet 1 cannot stop. A dreary man is 
 bad enough, but he would be endured because we 
 endure every variety of man with so amazing a 
 patience ; but a dreary woman is unforgivable, 
 hideous. Now, am I not luminously reasonable ? 
 But only in theory. My practice lies right down 
 on the ground, wet through by that icy fog that 
 is freezing me into something I do not recognize. 
 You do remember I was cheerful once? During 
 the whole of your year with us I defy you to 
 
 7»
 
 72 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 recollect a single day, a single hour of gloom. 
 Well, that is really how I always am, and I can 
 only suppose that I am going to be ill. There is 
 no other way of accounting for the cold terror of 
 life that sits crouching on my heart.
 
 XX 
 
 Dec. 3. 
 
 Dearest, — You will be pleased to hear that I 
 feel gayer to-night, so that I cannot, after all, be 
 sickening for anything horrid. It is an ungrateful 
 practice, letting one's self go to vague fears of 
 the future when there is nothing wrong with the 
 present. All these days during which I have 
 been steeped in gloom and have been taking pains 
 to put some of it into envelopes and send it to 
 you were good days in themselves. Life went on 
 here quite placidly. The weather was sweet with 
 that touching, forlorn sweetness of beautiful worn- 
 out things, of late autumn when winter is waiting 
 round the corner, of leaves dropping slowly down 
 through clear light, of the smell of oozy earth 
 sending up faint whiffs of corruption. From my 
 window I saw the hills every day at sunset, how 
 wonderfully they dressed themselves in pink ; and 
 in the afternoons, in the free hour when dinner 
 was done and coffee not yet thought of, I went 
 down into the Paradics valley and sat on the 
 coarse grey grass by the river, and watched the 
 water slipping by beneath the osiers, the one 
 hurried thing in an infinite tranquillity. I ought 
 to have had a volume of Goethe under my arm 
 
 73
 
 74 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 and been happy. 1 ought to have read nice bits 
 out of " Faust," or about those extraordinary- 
 people in the Elective Affinities, and rejoiced in 
 Goethe, and in the fine days, and in my good 
 fortune in being alive, and in having you to love. 
 Well, it is over now, I hope, — I mean the gloom. 
 These things must take their course, I suppose, 
 and while they are doing it one must grope about 
 as best one can by the flickering lantern-light of 
 one's own affrighted spirit. My stepmother looked 
 at me at least once on each of these miserable 
 days, and said : " Rose-Marie, you look very 
 odd. I hope you are not going to have anything 
 expensive. Measles are in Jena, and also the 
 whooping-cough." 
 
 " Which of them is the cheapest ? " I inquired. 
 
 " Both are beyond our means," said my step- 
 mother, severely. 
 
 And to-day at dinner she was quite relieved 
 because I ate some dicker Rets, after having turned 
 from it with abhorrence for at least a week. Good- 
 bye, dearest. 
 
 Your almost cured 
 
 Rose-Marie.
 
 XXI 
 
 Jena, Dec. 4, 
 
 Your letter has come. You must do what 
 you know is best. I agree to everything. You 
 must do what your father has set his heart on, 
 since quite clearly your heart is set on the same 
 thing. All the careful words in the world cannot 
 hide that from me. And they shall not. Do 
 you think I dare not look death in the face ? I 
 am just the girl you kissed once behind a door, 
 giving way before a passing gust of temptation. 
 You cannot, shall not marry me as the price of 
 that slight episode. You say you will if I insist. 
 Insist .? My dear Roger, with both hands I give 
 you back any part of your freedom I may have 
 had in my keeping. Reason, expediency, all the 
 prudences are on your side. You depend entirely 
 on your father ; you cannot marry against his 
 wishes ; he has told you to marry Miss Cheriton ; 
 she is the daughter of his oldest friend ; she is 
 extremely rich ; every good gift is hers ; and I 
 cannot compete. Compete ? Do you suppose 
 I would put out a finger to compete ? I give it 
 up. I bow myself out. 
 
 But let us be honest. Apart from anything 
 to do with your father's commands, you have 
 
 75
 
 76 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 fallen into her toils as completely as you did into 
 mine. My stepmother was right about your soft- 
 ness. Any woman who chose and had enough 
 opportunity could make you think you loved her, 
 make you kiss her. Luckily this one is absolutely 
 suitable. You say, in the course of the longest 
 letter you have written me — it must have been 
 a tiresome letter to have to write — that father or 
 no father you will not be hurried, you will not 
 marry for a long time, that the wound is too 
 fresh, etc., etc. What is this talk of wounds ? 
 Nobody knows about me. 1 shall not be in your 
 way. You need observe no period of mourning 
 for a corpse people don't know is there. True, 
 Miss Cheriton herself knows. Well, she will not 
 tell ; and if she does not mind, why should you .'' 
 I am so sorry I have written you so many letters 
 full of so many follies. Will you burn them ? I 
 would rather not have them back. But I enclose 
 yours, as you may prefer to burn them yourself I 
 am so very sorry about everything. At least it has 
 been short, and not dragged on growing thinner 
 and thinner till it died of starvation. Once I 
 wrote and begged you to tell me if you thought 
 you had made a mistake about me, because I felt 
 I could bear to know better then than later. And 
 you wrote back and swore all sorts of things by 
 heaven and earth, all sorts of convictions and un- 
 shakable things. Well, now you have another 
 set of convictions, that's all. I am not going to 
 beat the big drum of sentiment and make a wailful 
 noise. Nothing is so dead as a dead infatuation.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 77 
 
 The more a person was infatuated the more he 
 resents an attempt to galvanize the dull dead thing 
 into life. I am wise, you see, to the end. And 
 reasonable, too, I hope. And brave. And brave, 
 I tell you. Do you think I will be a coward, and 
 cry out ? I make you a present of everything ; 
 of the love and happy thoughts, of the pleasant 
 dreams and plans, of the little prayers sent up, 
 and the blessings called down — there were a great 
 many every day — of the kisses, and all the dear 
 sweetness. Take it all. I want nothing from 
 you in return. Remember it as a pleasant inter- 
 lude, or fling it into a corner of your mind where 
 used-up things grow dim with cobwebs. But do 
 you suppose that, having given you all this, I am 
 going to give you my soul as well .'' To moan 
 my life away, my beautiful life .'' You are not 
 worth it. You are not worth anything, hardly. 
 You are quite invertebrate. My life shall be 
 splendid in spite of you. You shall not cheat 
 me of one single chance of heaven. Now, good- 
 bye. Please burn this last one too. I suppose 
 no one who heard it would quite believe this 
 story, would quite believe it possible for a man 
 to go such lengths of — shall we call it unkindncss .'' 
 to a girl in a single month ; but you and I know 
 
 it is true. 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXII 
 
 Jena, March 5. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — It was extremely kind 
 of you to remember my birthday and to find 
 time in the middle of all your work to send me 
 your good wishes. I hope you are getting on 
 well, and that you like what you are doing. Pro- 
 fessor Martens seems to tell you all the Jena 
 news. Yes, 1 was ill ; but we had such a long 
 winter that it was rather lucky to be out of it, 
 tucked away comfortably in bed. There is still 
 snow in the ditches and on the shady side of 
 things. I escaped the bad weather as thoroughly 
 as those persons do who go with infinite trouble 
 during these months to Egypt. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 My father and stepmother beg to be remem- 
 bered to you. 
 
 78
 
 XXIII 
 
 Jena, March i8. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — It is very kind 
 indeed of you to want to know how I am and 
 what was the matter with me. It wasn't anything 
 very pleasant, but quite inoffensive aesthetically. 
 I don't care to think about it much. I caught 
 cold, and it got on to my lungs and stayed on 
 them. Now it is over, and I may walk up and 
 down the sunny side of the street for half an hour 
 on fine days. 
 
 We all hope you are well, and that you like 
 your work. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt, 
 
 79
 
 XXIV 
 
 Jena, March 25. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — You ask mc to tell 
 you more about my illness, but I am afraid I 
 must refuse. I see no use in thinking of painful 
 past things. They ought always to be forgotten 
 as quickly as possible ; if they are not, they have 
 a trick of turning the present sour, and I cling to 
 the present, to the one thing one really has, and 
 like to make it as cheerful as possible — like to 
 get, by industrious squeezing, every drop of 
 honey out of it. Just now I cannot tell you how 
 thankful I am simply to be alive with nothing in 
 my body hurting. To be alive with a great many 
 things in one's body hurting is a poor sort of 
 amusement. It is not at all a game worth play- 
 ing. People talk of sick persons clinging to life 
 however sick they are, say they invariably do it, 
 that they prefer it on any terms to dying ; well, I 
 was a sick person who did not cling at all. I did 
 not want it. I was most wilHng to be done with 
 it. But Death, though he used often to come up 
 and look at me, and once at least sat beside me 
 for quite a long while, went away again, and after 
 a time left off bothering about me altogether ; and 
 here I am, walking out in the sun every day, and 
 listening with immense pleasure to the chaffinches. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 80
 
 XXV 
 
 Jena, \rarch 31, 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Yes, of course I will 
 be friends. And if I can be of any use in the 
 way of admonishment, which seems to be my 
 strong point, pray, as people say in books, com- 
 mand me. Naturally we are all much interested 
 in you, and shall watch your career, I hope, with 
 pleasure. I am sorry the Foreign Office bores 
 you so much. Do you really have to spend your 
 days gumming up envelopes .? Not for that did 
 you win all those scholarships and things at Eton 
 and Oxford, and study Goethe and the minor 
 German prophets so diligently here. You say it 
 will go on for a year. Well, if that is your fate 
 and you cannot escape it, gum away gaily, since 
 gum you must. Later on, when you are an 
 ambassador and everybody is talking to you at 
 once, you will look back on the envelope time as 
 a blessed period when at least you were left alone. 
 But I hope you have a nice wet sponge to do It 
 with, and arc not so lost to what is expedient as to 
 be like a little girl I sat next to yesterday at a 
 coffee party, who had smudged most of the cream 
 that ought to have gone inside her outside her, 
 and when I suggested a handkerchief said she
 
 82 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 didn't hold with handkerchiefs and never had one. 
 "But what does one do, then," I asked, looking 
 at her disgraceful little mouth, " in a case like 
 this ? You can't borrow somebody else's — it 
 wouldn't be being select." " Oh," she said arily, 
 " don't you know ? You take your tongue." 
 And in a twinkling the thing was done. But 
 please do not you do that with the envelopes. 
 My father and stepmother send you many kind 
 messages. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXVI 
 
 Jena, April 9. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — No, I do not in the 
 least mind your writing to me. Do, when- 
 ever you feel you want to talk to a friend. It is 
 pleasant to be told that my letters remind you of 
 so many nice things. I expect your year in Jena 
 seems much more agreeable, now that you have 
 had time to forget the uncomfortable parts of it, 
 than it really was. But I don't think you would 
 have been able to endure it if you had not been 
 working so hard. I am sorry you do not like 
 your father. You say so straight out, so I see no 
 reason for roundaboutness. 1 expect he will be 
 calmer when you are married. Why do you not 
 gratify him, and have a short engagement ? Yes, 
 1 do understand what you feel about the merciful- 
 ness of being often left alone, though I have 
 never been worried in quite the same way as you 
 seem to be ; when I am driven it is to places like 
 the kitchen, and your complaint is that you are 
 driven to what most people would call enjoying 
 yourself Really, I think my sort of driving is 
 best. There is so much satisfaction about work, 
 about any work. But just to amuse one's self, and 
 to be, besides, in a perpetual hurry over it because 
 there is so much of it and the day can't be made 
 
 83
 
 84 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 to stretch, must be a sorry business. I wonder 
 why you do it. You say your father insists on 
 your going everywhere with the Cheritons, and 
 the Cheritons will not miss a thing ; but, after 
 all, isn't it rather weak to let yourself be led round 
 by the nose if your nose doesn't like it .'* It is as 
 though instead of a dog wagging its tail the tail 
 should wag the dog. And all Nature surely 
 would stand aghast before such an improper 
 spectacle. 
 
 The wind is icy, and the snow patches are 
 actually still here, but In the nearest garden I can 
 get to I saw violets yesterday in flower, and 
 crocuses and scillas, and one yellow pansy staring 
 up at the sun astonished and reproachful because 
 it had bits of frozen snow stuck to its little cheeks. 
 Dear me, it is a wonderful feeling, this resurrec- 
 tion every year. Does one ever grow too old, I 
 wonder, to thrill over it ? I know the blackbirds 
 are whistling in the orchards if I could only get 
 to them, and my father says the larks have been 
 out in the bare places for these last four weeks. 
 On days like this, when one's immortality is 
 racing along one's blood, how impossible it is to 
 think of death as the end of everything. And as 
 for being grudging and disagreeable, the thing's 
 not to be done. Peevishness and an April morn- 
 ing ^ Why, even my stepmother opened her 
 window to-day and stood for a long time in the 
 sun, watching how 
 
 proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, 
 Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 85 
 
 The first part of the month with us is generally 
 bustling and busy, a great clatter and hustling 
 while the shrieking winter is got away out of sight 
 over the hills, a sweeping of the world clear for 
 the marsh-marigolds and daffodils, a diligent 
 making of room for the divine calms of May. I 
 always loved this first wild frolic of cold winds 
 and catkins and hurriedly crimsoning pollards, of 
 bleakness and promise, of roughness and sweet- 
 ness — a blow on one cheek and a kiss on the 
 other — before the spring has learned good man- 
 ners, before it has left off being anything but a 
 boisterous, naughty, charming Backfisch ; but this 
 year, after having been ill so long, it is more than 
 love, it is passion. Only people who have been 
 buried in beds for weeks, getting used to listening 
 for Death's step on the stairs, know what it is to 
 go out into the stinging freshness of the young 
 year and meet the first scilla, and hear a chaffinch 
 calling out, and feel the sun burn red patches of 
 life on their silly, sick white faces. 
 
 My parents send you kind remembrances. 
 They were extremely interested to hear, through 
 Professor Martens, of your engagement to Miss 
 Chcriton. They both think it a most excellent 
 thing. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt,
 
 XXVII 
 
 Jena, April 20. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — You tell me I do not 
 answer your letters, but really I think I do quite 
 often enough. I want to make the most of these 
 weeks of idle getting strong again, and it is a 
 sad waste of time writing. My stepmother has 
 had such a dose of me sick and incapable, of 
 doctor's bills and physic and beef-tea and night- 
 lights, that she is prolonging the convalescent 
 period quite beyond its just limits and will have 
 me do nothing lest I should do too much. So I 
 spend strange, glorious days, days strange and 
 glorious to me, with nothing to do for anybody 
 but myself and a clear conscience to do it with. 
 The single sanction of my stepmother's approval 
 has been enough to clear my conscience, from 
 which you will see how illogically consciences can 
 be cleared ; for have I not always been sure she 
 has no idea whatever of what is really good ? 
 Yet just her approval, a thing I know to be faulty 
 and for ever in the wrong place, is sufficient to 
 prop up my conscience and make it feel secure. 
 How then, while I am busy reading Jane Austen 
 and Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth — books 
 foreordained from all time for the delight of 
 
 86 ^
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 87 
 
 persons getting well — shall I find time to write 
 to you ? And you must forgive me for a certain 
 surprise that you should have time to write so 
 much to me. What have I done to deserve these 
 long letters ? How many Foreign Office envelopes 
 do you leave ungummed to write them ? Es ist 
 zu vie/ E/ire. It is very good of you. No, I 
 will not make phrases like that, for 1 know you 
 do not do it for any reason whatever but because 
 you happen to want to. 
 
 You are going through one of those tiresome 
 soul-sicknesses that periodically overtake the too 
 comfortable, and you must, apparently, tell some- 
 body about it. Well, it is a form of IVehschnierZy 
 and only afflicts the well-fed. Pray do not suppose 
 that I am insinuating that food is of undue interest 
 to you ; but it is true that if you did not have 
 several meals a day and all of them too nice, if 
 there were doubts about their regular recurrence, 
 if, briefly, you were a washerwoman or a plough- 
 boy, you would not have things the matter with 
 your soul. Washerwomen and ploughboys do 
 not have sick souls. Probably you will say they 
 have no souls to be sick ; but they have, you 
 know. I imagine their souls thin and threadbare, 
 stunted by cold and hunger, poor and pitiful, but 
 certainly there. And I don't know that it is not 
 a nicer sort of soul to have inside one's plodding 
 body than an unwieldy, overgrown thing, chiefly 
 water and air and lightly changeable stuff, so 
 unsubstantial that it flops — forgive the word, but 
 if docs flop — on to other souls in search ot
 
 88 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 sympathy, and support, and comfort, and all the 
 rest of the things washerwomen waste no time 
 looking for, because they know they wouldn't 
 find them. 
 
 You are a poet, and I do not take a youthful 
 poet seriously ; but If you were not I would laugh 
 derisively at your comparing the entrance of my 
 letters into your room at the Foreign Office to 
 the bringing In of a bunch of cottage flowers still 
 fresh with dew. I don't know that my pride 
 does not rather demand a comparison to a bunch 
 of hothouse flowers — a bouquet it would become 
 then, wouldn't it ? — or my romantic sense to a 
 bunch of field flowers, wild, graceful, easily wearied 
 things, that would not care at all for Foreign 
 Offices. But I expect cottage is really the word. 
 My letters conjure up homely visions, and I am 
 sure the bunch you see is a tight posy of 
 
 Sweet- Williams, with their homely cottage smell. 
 
 It was charming of Matthew Arnold to let Sweet- 
 Williams have such a nice line, but I don't think 
 they quite deserve it. They have a dear little 
 name and a dear little smell, but the things them- 
 selves might have been manufactured in a Berlin 
 furniture shop where upholstery in plush prevails, 
 instead of made in that sweetest corner of heaven 
 from whence all good flowers come. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose- Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXVIII 
 
 Jena, April 26. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — You seem to be in- 
 curably doleful. You talk about how nice it 
 must be to have a sister^ a mother, some woman 
 very closely related to whom you could talk. You 
 astonish me ; for have you not Miss Cheriton } 
 Still, on reflection, I think I do see that what you 
 feel you want is more a solid bread-and-butter 
 sort of relationship ; no sentiment, genial good 
 advice, a helping hand if not a guiding one — 
 really a good thick slice of bread-and-butter as a 
 set-off to a diet of constant cake. I can read 
 between your lines with sufficient clearness ; and 
 as I always had a certain talent for stodginess, I 
 will waste no words but offer myself as the bread- 
 and-butter. Somehow 1 think it might work out 
 my soul's release from self-reproach and doubts if 
 I can help you, as far as one creature can help 
 another, over some of the more tiresome places of 
 life. Exhortation, admonishment, encouragement, 
 you shall have them all, if you like, by letter. In 
 these my days of dignified leisure I have had room 
 to think, and so have learned to look at things 
 differently from the way I used to. Life is so 
 short that there is hardly time for anything except 
 
 89
 
 90 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 to be, as St. Paul says — wasn't It St. Paul ? — kind 
 to one another. You are, I think, a most weak 
 person. Anything more easily delighted in the 
 first place or more quickly tired in the second 
 I never in my life saw. Does nothing satisfy you 
 for more than a day or two } And the enthusiasm 
 of you at the beginnings of things. And the 
 depression, the despair or you once you have got 
 used to them. I know you are clever, full of 
 brains, intellectually all that can be desired, but 
 what's the good of that* when the rest of you is 
 so weak .? You are of a diseased fastidiousness. 
 There's not a person you have praised to me 
 whom you have not later on disliked. "When 
 you were here I used to wonder as I listened, but 
 I did believe you. Now I know that the world 
 cannot possibly contain so many offensive people, 
 and that it is always so with you — violent heat, 
 freezing cold. I cannot see you drown without 
 holding out a hand. For you are young ; you 
 are, in the parts outside your strange, ill-disciplined 
 emotions, most full of promise ; and circumstances 
 have knitted me into an unalterable friend. Per- 
 haps I can help you to a greater steadfastness, a 
 greater compactness of soul. But do not tell me 
 too much. Do not put me in an inextricably 
 difficult position. It would not, of course, be 
 really inextricable, for 1 would extricate myself 
 by the simple process of relapsing into silence. 
 1 say this because your letters have a growing 
 tendency to pour out everything you happen to 
 be feeling. That in itself is not a bad thing, but
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 91 
 
 you must rightly choose your listener. Not 
 every one should be allowed to listen. Certain 
 things cannot be shouted out from the housetops. 
 You forget that we hardly know each other, and 
 that the well-mannered do not thrust their deeper 
 feelings on a person who shrinks from them. I 
 hope you understand that I am willing to hear 
 you talk about most things, and that you will 
 need no further warning to keep off the few 
 swampy places. And just think of all the things 
 you can write to me about, all the masses of 
 breathlessly interesting things in this breathlessly 
 interesting world, without talking about people at 
 all. Look round you this fine spring weather and 
 tell me, for instance, what April is doing up your 
 way, and whether, as you go to your work through 
 the park, you too have not seen heavy Saturn 
 laughing and leaping — how that sonnet has got 
 into my head — and do not every day thank God 
 for having bothered to make you at all. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXIX 
 
 Jena, April 30. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — You know the little 
 strip of balcony outside our sitting-room window, 
 with its view over the trees of the Paradies valley 
 to the beautiful hills across the river ? Well, this 
 morning is so fine, the sun is shining so warmly, 
 that I had my coffee and roll there, and now, 
 wrapped up in rugs, am still there writing to you. 
 I can't tell you how wonderful it is. The birds 
 are drunk with joy. There are blackbirds, and 
 thrushes, and chaffinches, and yellow-hammers, all 
 shouting at once ; and every now and then, when 
 the clamour has a gap in it, I hear the whistle of 
 the great tit, the dear small bird who is the very 
 first to sing, bringing its pipe of hope to those early 
 days in February when the world is at its blackest. 
 Have you noticed how different one's morning 
 coffee tastes out of doors from what it does in a 
 room .'' And the roll and butter — oh, the roll and 
 butter ! So must rolls and butter have tasted in 
 the youth of the world, when gods and mortals 
 were gloriously mixed up together, and you went 
 for walks on exquisite things like parsley and violets. 
 If Thoreau — I know you don't like him, but that's 
 only because you have read and believed Stevenson 
 
 9a
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 93 
 
 about him — could have seen the eager interest with 
 which I ate my roll just now, he would, I am afraid, 
 have been disgusted ; for he severely says that It is 
 not what you eat, but the spirit In which you eat 
 it — you are not, that Is, to like It too much — that 
 turns you Into a glutton. It Is, he says, neither 
 the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to 
 sensual savours that makes your eating horrid. A 
 puritan, he says, may go to his brown bread crust 
 with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his 
 turtle. Thus did I go, as grossly as the grossest 
 alderman, this morning to my crust, and rejoiced 
 in the sensual savour of it and was very glad. 
 How nice it Is, how pleasant, not to be with people 
 you admire. Admiration, veneration, the best form 
 of love — they are all more comfortably indulged 
 in from a distance. There is too much whalebone 
 about them at close quarters with their object, too 
 much whalebone and not nearly enough slippers. 
 I am glad Thoreau is dead. I love him far too 
 much ever to want to see him ; and how thankful 
 I am he cannot see me. 
 
 It is my stepmother's birthday, and trusted 
 friends have been streaming up our three flights 
 of stairs since quite early to bring her hyacinths In 
 pots and unhappy roses spiked on wires and make 
 her congratulatory speeches. I hear them talking 
 through the open window, and what they say, 
 wafted out to me here In the sun, sounds like the 
 pleasant droning of bees when one is only half 
 awake. First, there Is the distant electric bell 
 and the tempestuous whirl of Johanna down the
 
 94 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 passage. Then my stepmother emerges from the 
 kitchen and meets the arriving friend with voci- 
 ferous welcoming. Then the friend is led into 
 the room here, talking in gasps as we all do on 
 getting to the top of this house, and flinging cas- 
 cades of good wishes for her Hebe Emilie on to 
 the Hebe Emilie'' s head. Then the hyacinths or the 
 roses are presented : — " I have brought thee a small 
 thing," says the friend, presenting ; and my step- 
 mother, who has been aware of their presence the 
 whole time, but, with careful decency, has avoided 
 looking at them, starts, protests, and launches forth 
 on to heaving billows of enthusiasm. She does 
 not care for flowers, either in pots or on wires or 
 in any other condition, so her gratitude is really 
 most creditably done. Then they settle down in 
 the corners of the sofa and talk about the things 
 they really want to talk about — neighbours, food, 
 servants, pastors, illnesses, Providence ; beginning, 
 since I was ill, with a perfunctory inquiry from the 
 visitor as to the health of die gute Rose-Marie. 
 
 " Danke, dankcy' says my stepmother. You 
 know in Germany whenever anybody asks after 
 anybody you have to begin your answer with 
 danke. Sometimes the results are odd ; for in- 
 stance : " How is your poor husband to-day ? " 
 " Oh, danke^ he is dead." 
 
 So my stepmother, too, says danke, and then I 
 hear a murmur of further information, and catch 
 the world zart. Then they talk, still in murmurs 
 not supposed to be able to get through the open 
 window and into my ears, about the quantity of
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 95 
 
 beef-tea I have consumed, the length of the 
 chemist's bill, the unfortunate circumstance that 
 I am so overgrown — " Weedy," says my step- 
 mother. 
 
 " Would you call her weedy ? " says the friend, 
 with a show of polite hesitation. 
 
 " Weedy," repeats my stepmother emphati- 
 cally ; and the friend remarks quite seriously that 
 when a person is so very long there Is always some 
 part of her bound to be In a draught and catching 
 cold. " It Is such a pity," concludes the friend, 
 " that she did not marry." (Notice the tense. 
 Half a dozen birthdays back it used to be " does 
 not.") 
 
 " Gcndemcn," says my stepmother, " do not 
 care for her." 
 
 " Armes Madchen^' murmurs the friend. 
 
 '-'■ Hcrr Gott^ ja,'' says my stepmother; "but 
 what is to be done .'' I have invited gentlemen in 
 past days. I have invited them to coffees, to beer 
 evenings, to music on Sunday afternoons, to the 
 reading aloud of Schiller's dramas, each with his 
 part and Rose-Marie with the heroine's ; and 
 though they came they also went away again. 
 Nothing was changed, except the size of my beer 
 bill. No, no, gentlemen do not care for her. In 
 society she docs not please." 
 
 ^'^ Armes M'adchcn^' says the friend again ; and 
 the armes Miidchen out In the sun laughs profanely 
 into her furs. 
 
 The fact is It is quite extraordinary the effect 
 my illness has had on me. I thought it was bad.
 
 96 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 and I see it was good. Beyond words ghastly at 
 the time, terrible, hopeless, the aches of my body 
 as nothing compared with the amazing anguish of 
 my soul, the world turned into one vast pit of 
 pain, impossible to think of the future, impossible 
 to think of the past, impossible to bear the present 
 — after all that behold me awake again, and so 
 wide awake, with eyes grown so quick to see the 
 wonder and importance of the little things of life, 
 the beauty of them, the joy of them, that I can 
 laugh aloud with glee at the delicious notion of 
 calling me an armes Madchen. Three months ago 
 with what miserable groanings, what infinite self- 
 pityings, I would have agreed. Now, clear of 
 vision, I see how many precious gifts I have — life, 
 and freedom from pain, and time to be used and 
 enjoyed — gifts no one can take from me except 
 God. Do you know any George Herbert ? He 
 was one of the many English poets my mother's 
 love of poetry made me read. Do you remember 
 
 I once more smell the dew, the rain, 
 
 And relish versing. 
 
 O, my only Light ! 
 
 It cannot be 
 
 That I am he 
 
 On whom thy tempests fell all night ? 
 
 Well, that is how I feel : full of wonder and 
 an unspeakable relief. It is so strange how bad 
 things — things we call bad — bring forth good 
 things, from the manure that brings forth roses 
 lovely in proportion to its manuriness to the 
 worst experiences that can overtake the soul. 
 And as far as I have been able to see (which is
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 97 
 
 not very far, for I know I am not a clever woman) 
 it is also true that good things bring forth bad 
 ones. I cannot tell you how much life surprises 
 me. I never get used to it. I never tire ot 
 pondering and watching and wondering. The 
 way in which eternal truths lurk along one's path, 
 lie among the potatoes in cellars (did you ever 
 observe the conduct of potatoes in cellars .'' their 
 desperate determination to reach up to the light .? 
 their absolute concentration on that one distant 
 glimmer .''), peep out at one from every apparently 
 dull corner, sit among the stones, hang upon the 
 bushes, come into one's room in the morning 
 with the hot water, come out at night in heaven 
 with the stars, never leave us, touch us, press 
 upon us, if we choose to open our eyes and look, 
 and our ears and listen — how extraordinary it is. 
 Can one be bored in a world so wonderful .'' And 
 then the keen interest there is to be got out of 
 people, the keen joy to be got out of common 
 affections, the delight of having a fresh day every 
 morning before you, a fresh, long day, bare and 
 empty, to be filled as you pass along it with 
 nothing but clean and noble hours. You must 
 forgive this exuberance. The sun has got into 
 my veins and has turned everything golden. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 H
 
 XXX 
 
 Jena, May 6. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — How can 1 help it 
 if things look golden to me ? You almost re- 
 proach me for it. You seem to think it selfish, 
 and talk of the beauty of sympathy with persons 
 less fortunately constituted. That's a grey sort 
 of beauty ; the beauty of mists, and rains, and 
 tears. I wish you could have been in the 
 meadows across the river this morning and seen 
 the dandelions. There was not much greyness 
 about them. From the bridge to the tennis- 
 courts — you know that is a long way, at least 
 twenty minutes' walk — they are one sheet of gold. 
 If you had been there before breakfast, with your 
 feet on that divine carpet, and your head in the 
 flickering slight shadows of the first willow leaves, 
 and your eyes on the shining masses of slow 
 white clouds, and your ears filled with the fresh 
 sound of the river, and your nose filled with the 
 smell of young wet things, you wouldn't have 
 wanted to think much about such grey negations 
 as sympathizing with the gloomy. Bother the 
 gloomy. They are an ungrateful set. If they 
 
 can they will turn the whole world sour^ and sap 
 
 98
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 99 
 
 up all the happiness of the children of light 
 without giving out any shining in return. I am 
 all for sun, and heat, and colour, and scent — for all 
 things radiant and positive. If, crushing down 
 my own nature, I set out deliberately to console 
 those you call the less fortunately constituted, 
 do you know what would happen ? They would 
 wring me quite dry of cheerfulness, and not be 
 one whit more cheerful for all the wringing them- 
 selves. They can't. They were not made that 
 way. People are born in one of three classes : 
 children of light, children of twilight, children of 
 night. And how can they help into which class 
 they are born ? But I do think the twilight 
 children can by diligence, by, if you like, prayer 
 and fasting, come out of the dusk into a greater 
 brightness. Only they must come out by them- 
 selves. There must be no pulling. I don't at 
 all agree with your notion of the efficacy of being 
 pulled. Don't you, then, know — of course you 
 do, but you have not yet realized — that you are 
 to seek frsi the Kingdom of God and His 
 righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
 unto you ? And don't you know — oh, have you 
 forgotten ? — that the Kingdom of God is within 
 you? So what is the use of looking to anything 
 outside of you and separated from you for help ? 
 There is no help, except what you dig out of 
 your own self; and it I could make you see 
 that 1 would have shown you all the secrets 
 of life. 
 
 How wisely I talk. It is the wisdom of the
 
 100 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 ever-recurring grass, the good green grass, the 
 grass starred with living beauty, that has got into 
 me ; the wisdom of a May morning filled with 
 present joy, of the joy of the moment, without 
 any weakening waste of looking beyond. So 
 don't mock. I can't help it. 
 
 Do you, then, want to be pitied ? I will 
 pity you if you like, in so many carefully chosen 
 words ; but they will not be words from the 
 heart but only, as the charming little child in the 
 flat below us, the child with the flaunting yellow 
 hair and audacious eyes, said of some speech that 
 didn't ring true to her quick ears, "from the tip 
 of the nose." I cannot really pity you, you know. 
 You are too healthy, too young, too fortunate for 
 that. You ought to be quite jubilant with cheer- 
 fullest gratitude ; and, since you are not, you very 
 perfectly illustrate the truth of k trop being rennemi 
 du bietty or, if you prefer your clumsier mother 
 tongue, of the half being better than the whole. 
 How Is it that I, bereft of everything you think 
 worth having, am so ofi^ensively cheerful .? Your 
 friends would call It a sordid existence, if they 
 considered it with anything more lengthy than 
 just a snifi\ No excitements, no clothes, acquaint- 
 ances so shabby that they seem almost moth eaten, 
 the days filled with the same dull round, a home 
 in a little town where we all get into one groove 
 and having got into it stay in it, to which only 
 faint echoes come of what is going on in the 
 world outside, a place where one is amused and 
 entertained by second-rate things, second-rate
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER loi 
 
 concerts, second-rate plays, and feels one's self grow 
 cultured by attendance at second-rate debating- 
 society meetings. Would you not think I must 
 starve in such a place ? But I don't. My soul 
 doesn't dream of starving ; in fact, I am quite 
 anxious about it, it has lately grown so fat. 
 There is so little outside it — for the concerts, 
 plays, debates, social gatherings, are dust and 
 ashes near which I do not go — that it eagerly 
 turns to what is inside it, and finds itself full 
 of magic forces of heat and light, forces hot and 
 burning enough to set every common bush afire 
 with God. That is Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; 
 I mean about the common bushes. A slightly 
 mutilated Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but still a 
 quotation ; and if you do not happen to know 
 it I won't have you go about thinking it pure 
 Schmidt. Ought I, if I quote, to warn you of 
 the fact by the pointing fingers of inverted 
 commas ? 1 don't care to, somehow. They 
 make such a show of importance. I prefer to 
 suppose you cultured. Oh, I can see you shiver 
 at that impertinence, for I know down in your 
 heart, though you always take pains to explain 
 how ignorant you are, you consider yourself an 
 extremely cultured young man. And so you 
 are ; cultured, I should say, out of all reason ; 
 so much cultured that there's hardly anything 
 left that you arc able to like, indeed, it is 
 surprising that you should care to write to a 
 rough, unscrapcd sort of person like myself. 
 Do not my crudities set your teeth on edge as
 
 102 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 acutely as the juice of a very green apple ? You 
 who love half tones, subtleties, suggestions, who, 
 lifting the merest fringe of things, approach them 
 nearer only by infinite implications, what have 
 you to do with the downrightness of an east 
 wind or a green apple ? Why, I wonder that 
 just the recollection of my red hands, knobbly 
 and spread with work, does not make you wince 
 into aloofness. And my clothes ? What about 
 my clothes ? Do you not like exquisite women ? 
 Perfectly got-up women ? Fresh and dainty, 
 constantly renewed women ? It is two years 
 since I had a new hat ; and as for the dress that 
 sees me through my days, I really cannot count 
 the time since it started in my company a Sunday 
 and fete-day garment. If you were once, only 
 once, to see me in the middle of your friends 
 over there, you would be cured for ever of 
 wanting to write to me. I belong to your Jena 
 days ; days of hard living and working and 
 thinking ; days when, by dint of being forced to 
 do without certain bodily comforts, the accom- 
 modating spirit made up for it by its own in- 
 creased comfort and warmth. Probably your 
 spirit will never again attain to quite so bright 
 a shining as it did that year. How can it, unless 
 it is amazingly strong — and I know it well not 
 to be that — shine through the suffocating masses 
 of upholstry your present life piles about it ? 
 Poor spirit. At least see to it that its flicker 
 doesn't quite go out. To urge you to strip your 
 life of all this embroidery and let it get the
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 103 
 
 draught of air it needs would be, I know, mere 
 waste of ink. 
 
 My people send you every good wish. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXXI 
 
 Jena, May 14. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstrutiier, — Of course I am full 
 of contradictions. Did you expect me to be 
 full of anything else ? And I have no doubt 
 whatever that in every letter I say exactly the 
 opposite from what I said in the last one. But 
 you must not mind this and make it an occasion 
 for reproof. I do not pretend to think quite the 
 same even two days running ; if I did I would 
 be stagnant, and the very essence of life is to be 
 fluid, to pass perpetually on. So please do not 
 hold me responsible for convictions that I have 
 changed by the time they get to you, and above 
 all things don't bring them up against me and 
 ask me to prove them. I don't want to prove 
 them. I don't want to prove anything. My 
 attitude towards life is one of open-mouthed 
 wonder and delight, and the open-mouthed cannot 
 talk. You write, too, plaintively, that some of 
 the things I say hurt you. I am sorry. Sorry, I 
 mean, that you should be so soft. Can you not, 
 then, bear anything ? But I will smooth my 
 tongue if you prefer it smooth, and send you 
 envelopes filled only with sugar ; talk to you 
 about the parks, the London season, the Foreign 
 
 104
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 105 
 
 Office — all things of which I know nothing — 
 and, patting you at short intervals on the back, 
 tell you you are admirable. You say there is 
 a bitter flavour about some of my remarks. 1 
 have not felt bitter. Perhaps a little shrewish ; 
 a little like, not a mild exhorting elder sister, but 
 an irritated aunt. You see, I am interested enough 
 in you to be fidgety when I hear you groan. 
 What, I ask myself uneasily, can be the matter 
 with this apparently healthy, well-carcd-for young 
 man ? And then, forced to the conclusion by 
 unmistakable symptoms that there is nothing the 
 matter except a surfeit of good things, I have 
 perhaps pounced upon you with something of the 
 zeal of an aunt moved to anger, and given you 
 a spiritual slapping. You sighed for a sister — 
 you are always sighing for something — and asked 
 me to be one ; well, 1 have apparently gone 
 beyond the sister in decision and authority, and 
 developed something of the acerbity of an aunt. 
 
 So you are down at Clinches. How beautiful 
 it must be there this month. 1 think of it as a 
 harmony in grey and amethyst, remembering your 
 description of it the first time you went there; 
 a harmony in a minor key, that captured you 
 wholly by its tender subtleties. When I think 
 of you inheriting such a place later on through 
 your wife I do from my heart feel that your 
 engagement is an excellent thing. She must 
 indeed be happy in the knowledge that she can 
 give you so much that is absolutely worth having. 
 It is beautiful, beautiful to give ; one of the very
 
 io6 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 most beautiful things in life. I quarrel with 
 my poverty only because 1 can give so little, so 
 seldom, and then never more than ridiculous small 
 trumperies. To make up for them I try to give 
 as much of myself as possible, gifts of sympathy, 
 helpfulness, kindness. Don't laugh, but I am 
 practising on my stepmother. It is easy to pour 
 out love on Papa ; so easy, so effortless, that I 
 do not feel as if it could be worth much ; but 
 I have made up my mind, not without something 
 of a grim determination that seems to have little 
 enough to do with love, to give my stepmother 
 as much of me, my affections, my services, as 
 she can do with. Perhaps she won't be able to 
 do with much. Anyhow, all she wants she shall 
 have. You know I have often wished I had 
 been a man, able to pull on my boots and go out 
 into the wide world without let or hindrance ; but 
 for one thing I am glad to be a woman, and that 
 one thing is that the woman gives. It is so far 
 less wonderful to take. The man is always taking, 
 the woman always giving ; and giving so wonder- 
 fully, in the face sometimes of dreadful disaster, 
 of shipwreck, of death — which explains perhaps 
 her longer persistence in clinging to the skirts of 
 a worn-out passion ; for is not the tenderer feel- 
 ing on the side of the one who gave and blessed ? 
 Always, always on that side .? Mixing into what 
 was sensual some of the dear divineness of the 
 mother-love ? I think I could never grow wholly 
 indifferent to a person to whom I had given much. 
 He or she would not, could not, be the same to
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 107 
 
 me as other people. Time would pass, and the 
 growing number of the days blunt the first sharp 
 edge of feeling ; but the memory of what I had 
 given would bind us together in a friendship for 
 ever unlike any other. 
 
 I have not thanked you for the book you 
 sent me. It was very kind indeed of you to wish 
 me to share the pleasure you have had in reading 
 it. But see how unfortunately contrary I am : 
 I don't care about it. And just the passages you 
 marked are the ones I care about least. I do not 
 hold with markings in books. Whenever I have 
 come across mine after a lapse of years I have 
 marvelled at the distance travelled since I marked, 
 and shut up the book and murmured, "Little 
 fool." I can't imagine why you thought I should 
 like this book. It has given me rather a surprised 
 shock that you should know me so little, and 
 that I should know you so little as to think you 
 knew me better. Really all the explanations and 
 pointings in the world will not show a person 
 the exact position of his neighbour's soul. It is 
 astonishing enough that the book was printed, 
 but how infinitely more astonishing that people 
 like you should admire it. What is the matter 
 with me that I cannot admire it .'' Why am I 
 missing things that ought to give me pleasure ? 
 You do not, then, see that it is dull ^ I do. I 
 see it and feel it in every bone, and it makes them 
 ache. It is dull and bnd because it is so dreary, 
 so hopelessly dreary. Life is not like that. Life 
 is only like that to cowards who are temporarily
 
 io8 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 indisposed. I do not care to look at It through 
 a sick creature's jaundiced eyes and shudder with 
 him at what he sees. If he cannot see better why 
 not keep quiet, and let us braver folk march along 
 with our heads In the air, held so high that we 
 cannot bother to look at every slimy creepiness 
 that crawls across our path ? And did you not 
 notice how he keeps on telling his friends in his 
 letters not to mind when he is dead .'' Unneces- 
 sary advice, one would suppose ; I can more 
 easily imagine the friends gasping with an Infinite 
 relief. Persons who are everlastingly claiming 
 pity, sympathy, condolences, are very wearing. 
 Surely all talk about one's death is selfish and 
 bad .? That is why, though there is so much that 
 is lovely In them, the faint breath of corruption 
 hanging about Christina Rossetti's poetry makes 
 me turn my head the other way. What a con- 
 stant cry It is that she wants to die, that she hopes 
 to die, that she's going to die, shall die, can die, 
 must die, and that nobody is to weep for her, but 
 that there are to be elaborate and moving arrange- 
 ments of lilies and roses and winding-sheets. 
 And at least in one place she gives directions as 
 to the proper use of green grass and wet dewdrops 
 upon her grave — implying that dewdrops are 
 sometimes dry. I think the only decent attitude 
 towards one's death is to be silent. Talk about 
 it puts other people in such an awkward position. 
 What Is one to say to persons who sigh and tell 
 us that they will no doubt soon be In heaven ? 
 One's Instinct Is politely to murmur, "Oh no,"
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 109 
 
 and then they are angry. " Surely not " also has 
 its pitfalls. Cheery words, of the order in speech 
 that a slap on the shoulder is in the sphere of 
 physical expression, only seem to deepen the 
 determined gloom. And if it is some one you 
 love who thinks he will soon be dead and tells 
 you so, the cruelty is very great. When death 
 really comes, is not what the ordinary decent dier 
 wants quiet, that he may leave himself utterly in 
 the hands of God .'' There should be no massing 
 of temporarily broken-hearted onlookers about 
 his bed, no leave-takings and eager gatherlngs-up 
 of last words, no revellings of relatives In the 
 voluptuousness of woe, no futile exhortations, 
 using up the last poor breaths, not to weep to 
 persons who would consider it highly improper 
 to leave off doing It, and no administration of 
 tardy blessings. Any blessings the dicr has to 
 invoke should have been invoked and done with 
 long ago. In this last hour, at least, can one not 
 be left alone ? Do you remember Pater's strange 
 feeling about death .'' Perhaps you do not, for 
 you told me once you did not care about him. 
 Well, it runs through his books, through all their 
 serenity and sunlight, through exquisite descrip- 
 tions of summer, of beautiful places, of heat and 
 life and youth and all things lovely, like a musty 
 black riband, very poor, very mean, very rotten, 
 that yet must bind these gracious flowers of light 
 at last together, bruising them into one piteous 
 mass of corruption. It is all very morbid : the 
 fair outward surface of daily life, the gay, flower-
 
 1 10 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 starred crust of earth, and just underneath horrible 
 tainted things, things forlorn and pitiful, things 
 which we who still walk on the wholesome grass 
 must soon join, changing our life in the roomy 
 sunshine into something infinitely dependent and 
 helpless, something that can only dimly live if 
 those strong friends of ours in the bright world 
 will spare us a thought, a remembrance, a few 
 minutes from their plenty for sitting beside us, 
 room in their hearts for yet a little love and 
 sorrow. " Dead cheek by dead cheek, and the 
 rain soaking down upon one from above. . . ." 
 Does not that sound hopeless .'' After reading 
 these things, sweet with the tainted sweetness of 
 decay, of ruin, of the past, the gone, it is like 
 having fresh spring water dashed over one on a 
 languid afternoon to remember Walt Whitman's 
 brave attitude towards " delicate death," " the 
 sacred knov/ledge of death," "lovely, soothing 
 death," "cool, enfolding death," "strong de- 
 liveress," " vast and well-veiled death," " the body 
 gratefully nestling close to death," " sane and 
 sacred death." That is the spirit that makes one 
 brave and fearless, that makes one live beautifully 
 and well, that sends one marching straight ahead 
 with limbs that do not tremble and head held 
 high. Is it not natural to love such writers best ? 
 Writers who fill one with glad courage and make 
 one proud of the path one has chosen to walk in .? 
 And yet you do not like Walt Whitman. I 
 remember quite well my chill of disappointment 
 when you told me so. At first, hearing it, I
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 1 1 1 
 
 thought I must be wrong to like hhn ; but, thank 
 Heaven, I soon got my balance again, and presently 
 was solaced by the reflection that it was at least 
 as likely you were wrong not to. You told me 
 it was not poetry. That upset me for a few days, 
 and then I found I didn't care. I couldn't argue 
 with you on the spot and prove anything, because 
 the only esprit I have is that tiresome e5p7'it 
 d^escalier^ so brilliant when it is too late, so con- 
 stant in its habit of leaving its possessor in the 
 dreadful condition — or is it a place i* — called the 
 lurch ; but, poetry or not, I knew I must always 
 love him. You, I suppose, have cultivated your 
 taste in regard to things of secondary importance 
 to such a pitch of sensitiveness that unless the 
 outer shell is flawless you cannot, for sheer 
 intellectual discomfort, look at the wonders that 
 often lie v/ithin. I, who have not been educated, 
 am so filled with elementary joy when some one 
 shows me the light in this world of many shadows 
 that I do not stop to consider what were the words 
 he used while my eyes followed his pointing 
 finger. You see, I try to console myself for 
 having an unpruned intelligence. I know I am 
 unpruned, and that at the most you pruned 
 people, all trim and trained from the first, do but 
 bear with me indulgently. But I must think 
 with the apparatus 1 possess, and I think at this 
 moment that perhaps what you really most want 
 is a prolonged dose of Walt Whitman, a close 
 study of him for several hours every day, shut up 
 with no other book, quite alone with him in an
 
 112 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 empty country place. Listen to this — you shall 
 listen : 
 
 O wc can wait no longer, 
 
 We too take ship, O soul ; 
 Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas. 
 Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail, 
 Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O 
 soul). 
 Carolling free, singing our song of God, 
 Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration, 
 
 O my brave soul I 
 
 O farther, farther sail ! 
 O daring joy, but safe ! are they not all the seas of God ? 
 
 O farther, farther sail 1 
 
 Well, how do you feel now ? Can any one, 
 can you, can even you read that without such a 
 tingling in all your limbs, such a fresh rush of 
 life and energy through your whole body that 
 you simply must jump up and, shaking off the 
 dreary nonsense that has been fooling you, turn 
 your back on diseased self-questionings and run 
 straight out to work at your salvation in the sun ? 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXXII 
 
 Jena, May 20. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I am sorry you think 
 me unsympathetic. Hard, I think, was the 
 word ; but unsympathetic sounds prettier. Is 
 it unsympathetic not to like fruitless, profidess, 
 barren things ? Not to like fogs and blights and 
 other deadening, decaying things ? From my 
 heart I pity all the people who are so made that 
 they cannot get on with their living for fear of 
 their dying ; but I do not admire them. Is that 
 being unsympathetic .? Apparently you think so. 
 How odd. There is a little man here who hardly 
 ever can talk to anybody without beginning about 
 his death. He is perfectly healthy, and I suppose 
 forty or fifty, so that there is every reasonable 
 hope of his going on being a little man for years 
 and years more ; but he will have it that as he 
 has never married or, as he puts it, done any- 
 thing else useful, he might just as well be dead, 
 and then at the word Dead his eyes get just 
 the look of absolute scaredness in them that a 
 hare's eyes do when a dog is after it. "If only 
 one knew what came next," he said last time 
 
 113 I
 
 114 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 he was here, looking at me with those frightened 
 eyes. 
 
 " Nice things I should think," said 1, trying 
 to be encouraging. 
 
 *' But to those who have deserved punish- 
 ment } " 
 
 " If they have deserved it they will probably 
 get it," said I, cheerfully. 
 
 He shuddered. 
 
 " You don't look very wicked," I went on 
 amiably. He leads a life of sheerest bread-and- 
 milk, so simple, so innocent, so full of little 
 hearthrug virtues. 
 
 " But I am," he declared angrily. 
 
 " I shouldn't think half so bad as a great 
 many people," said I, bent, being the hostess, 
 on a perfect urbanity. 
 
 *' Worse," said he, more angrily. 
 
 " Oh, come now," said 1, very politely as I 
 thought. 
 
 Then he really got into a rage, and asked 
 me what I could possibly know about it, and 
 1 said I didn't know anything ; and still he 
 stormed and grew more and more terrified, 
 frightening himself by his own words ; and at 
 last, dropping his voice, he confessed that he had 
 one particularly deadly fear, a fear that haunted 
 him and gave him no rest, that the wicked 
 would not burn eternally but would freeze. 
 
 "Oh," said 1, shrinking; for it was a bitter 
 day, and the north-east v/ind was thundering 
 among the hills.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 1 1 5 
 
 " Great cold," he said, " seems to be incom- 
 parably more terrible than great heat." 
 
 " Oh, incomparably," 1 agreed, edging nearer 
 to the stove. " Only listen to that wind." 
 
 " So will it howl about us through eternity," 
 said he. 
 
 " Oh," I shivered. 
 
 "Piercing one's unprotected — everything 
 about us will be unprotected then — one's un- 
 protected marrow, and turning it to ice within 
 us. 
 
 "But we won't have any marrows," said I. 
 
 " No marrows .'' Fraulein Rose-Marie, we 
 shall have everything that will hurt." 
 
 " Oh wch^' cried I, stopping up my ears. 
 
 " The thought frightens you ? " said he. 
 
 "Terrifies me," said I. 
 
 *' How much more fearful, then, will be the 
 reality." 
 
 " Well, I'd like to — I'd like to give you some 
 good advice," said I, hesitating. 
 
 "Certainly ; if one of your sex may with any 
 efficacy advise one of ours." 
 
 ** Oh — efficacy," murmured I, with proper 
 deprecation. " But I'd like to suggest — I daren't 
 advise, I'll just suggest " 
 
 " Fear nothing. I am all cars and willingness 
 to be guided," said he, smiling with an in- 
 describable graciousness. 
 
 « Well— don't go there." 
 
 " Not go there i " 
 
 "And while you are here — still here, and
 
 ii6 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 alive, and in nice warm woolly clothes, do you 
 know what you want ? " 
 
 « What I want ? " 
 
 " Very badly do you want a wife. Why not 
 go and get one ? " 
 
 His eyes at that grew more frightened than at 
 the thought of eternal ice. He seized his hat 
 and scrambled to the door. He went through it 
 hissing scorching things about moderne Madchen^ 
 and from the safety of the passage I heard him 
 call me unverschamt. 
 
 He hasn't been here since. I would like to 
 go and shake him ; shake him till his brains 
 settle into their proper place, and say while I 
 shake, " Oh, little man, little man, come out of 
 the fog 1 Why do you choose to die a thousand 
 deaths rather than only one } " 
 
 Is that being unsympathetic ? I think it is 
 being quite kind. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 What I really meant to write to you about 
 to-day was to tell you that I read your learned 
 and technical and 1 am sure admirable denounce- 
 ments of Walt Whitman with the respectful 
 attention due to so much earnestness ; and when 
 I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at 
 the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign 
 Office allows its young men^ I stretched myself, 
 and got my hat, and went down to the river ; 
 and 1 sat at the water's edge in the middle of a
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 117 
 
 great many buttercups ; and there was a little 
 wind ; and the little wind knocked the heads 
 of the buttercups together ; and it seemed to 
 amuse them, or else something else did, for I do 
 assure you I thought I heard them laugh.
 
 XXXIII 
 
 Jena, May 27. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — You asked me about 
 your successor in our house, and inquire why 
 I have never mentioned him. "Why should 
 I mention him .? Must I mention everything .? 
 I suppose I forgot him. His name is CoUins, 
 and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other 
 days a blue shirt, and in his right cufF there is 
 a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and 
 a blue silk handkerchief on the blue days ; and 
 he has stuck up the pictures he likes to have 
 about him on the walls of his room, and where 
 your Luini used to be there is a young lady in a 
 voluminous hat and short skirts, and where your 
 Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you with 
 austere, beautiful eyes, there is the winner, 
 complete with jockey, of last year's Derby. 
 
 " I made a pot of money over that," said Mr. 
 Collins to me the day he pinned it up and came 
 to ask me for the pin. 
 
 " Did you ? " said I. 
 
 But I think I am tired just now of Luinis 
 
 and Bellinis and of the sort of spirit in a young 
 
 man that clothes the walls of his room with them, 
 
 each in some elaborately simple frame, and am 
 
 118
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 1 19 
 
 not at all sure that the frank fleshliness of a 
 Collins does not please me best. You see, one 
 longs so much sometimes to get down to the 
 soil, down to plain Instincts, to rude nature, to, 
 if you like, elemental savagery. 
 
 But I'll go on with Mr. Collins ; you shall 
 have a dose of him while I am about it. He has 
 bought a canoe, and has won the cup for swim- 
 ming, wresting it from the reluctant hands of the 
 discomfited Jena young men. He paddles up to 
 the weir, gets out, picks up his canoe, carries it 
 round to the other side, gets in, and vanishes 
 in the windings of the water and the folds of 
 the hills, leaving the girls in the tennis-courts — 
 you remember the courts are opposite the weir — 
 uncertain whether to titter or to blush, for he 
 wears, I suppose, the fewest clothes that it is 
 possible to wear and still be called dressed, and 
 no stockings at all. 
 
 " Neiriy dieser Englander ! " gasp the girls, 
 turning down decent eyes. 
 
 " HoUisch practischy' declare the young men, 
 got up in as near an imitation of the flannels 
 you used to wear that they can reach, even their 
 hats bound about with a ribbon startlingly like 
 your Oxford half blue ; and before the summer 
 is over I dare say they will all be playing tennis 
 in the Collins canoe costume, stockingless, sleeve- 
 less, supposing it to be the latest cri in get-ups 
 for each and every form of sport. 
 
 Professor Martens didn't care about teaching 
 Mr. Collins, and insisted on iianding him over to
 
 120 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Papa. Papa doesn't care about teaching him, 
 either, and says he is a dummer Bengel who pro- 
 nounces Goethe as though it rhymed with dirty, 
 and who the first time our great poet was men- 
 tioned vacantly asked, with every indication of a 
 wandering mind, if he wasn't the joker who 
 wrote the play for Irving with all the devils in it. 
 Papa was so angry that he began a letter to Collins 
 pere^ telling him to remove his son to a city where 
 there are fewer muses ; but Collins -pere is a 
 person who makes nails in Manchester with 
 immense skill and application, and is terrifyingly 
 rich, and my stepmother's attitude towards the 
 terrifyingly rich is one of large forgiveness ; so 
 she tore up Papa's letter just where it had got to 
 the words erbarmUcher Esel^ said he was a very de- 
 cent boy, that he should stay as long as he wanted 
 to, but that, since he seemed to be troublesome 
 about learning, Papa must write and demand a 
 higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn't ; my 
 stepmother did ; and behold Joey — his Christian 
 name is Joey — more lucrative to us by, I believe, 
 just double than any one we have had yet. 
 
 " I say," said Joey to me this morning, "come 
 over to England some day, and I'll romp you 
 down to Epsom." 
 
 " Divine," said I, turning up my eyes. 
 
 "We'd have a rippin' time." 
 
 "Rather." 
 
 "I'd romp you dov/n in the old man's 
 motor." 
 
 " Not really f "
 
 FR'aULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 121 
 
 <c 
 
 We'd be there before you could flutter an 
 eyelash." 
 
 " Are you serious ? " 
 
 " Ain't I, though. It's a thirty-horse " 
 
 ** Can't you get them in London ? " 
 
 " Get 'em in London ? Get what in 
 London ? " 
 
 " Must one go every time all the way to 
 Epsom ? " 
 
 Joey ceased from speech and began to stare. 
 
 "Are we not talking about salts.?" I inquired 
 hastily, feeling that one of us was off the track. 
 
 "Salts?" echoed Joey, his mouth hanging 
 open. 
 
 " You mentioned Epsom, surely ? " 
 
 " Salts .? " 
 
 " You did say Epsom, didn't you ?'* 
 
 "Salts.?" 
 
 " Salts," said I, becoming very distinct in the 
 presence of what looked like deliberate wilful- 
 ness. 
 
 " What's it got to do with salts ? " asked 
 Joey, his underlip of a measureless vacancy. 
 
 " Hasn't it got everything ? " 
 
 " Look here, what arc you drivin' at ? Is it 
 goin' to be a game ? " 
 
 "Certainly not. It's Sunday. Did you never 
 hear of Epsom salts ? " 
 
 " Oh — ah — 1 see — Eno, and all that. Castor 
 oil. Rhubarb and magnesia. Well, I'll forgive 
 you as you're only German. Pretty weird, what 
 bits of information you get hold ot. Never the
 
 122 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 right bits, somehow. I'll tell you what, Miss 
 Schmidt " 
 
 « Oh, do." 
 
 "Do what?" 
 
 " Tell me what." 
 
 " Well, ain't I goin' to ? You all seem to 
 know everything in this house that's not worth 
 knowin', and not a blessed thing that is." 
 
 " Do you include Goethe ? " 
 
 " Confound Gerty," said Joey. 
 
 Such are my conversations with Joey. Is 
 there anything more you want to know ? 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXXIV 
 
 Jena, July 3. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I am sorry not to 
 have been able to answer your letters for so many 
 weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as 
 you say, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to 
 yours will have explained what has been happen- 
 ing to us. My stepmother died a fortnight ago. 
 Almost immediately after I wrote last to you she 
 began to be very ill. My feelings towards her 
 have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot 
 speak of her. She is revenging herself, as only 
 the dead in their utter unresentfulness can revenge 
 themselves, for every hard and scoffing thought 
 I had of her in life. I think I told you once 
 about her annuity. Now it is gone Papa and 
 I must see to it that we live on my mother's 
 money alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so 
 the living will have to be prudent ; not so pru- 
 dent, I hope, but that we shall have everything to 
 enjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent 
 enough to force us to take thought. So we arc 
 leaving the flat, grown far too expensive for us, 
 as soon as wc can find some other home. \Vc 
 have almost decided on one already. Mr. Collins 
 
 went to England when the iUness grew evidently 
 
 123
 
 124 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 hopeless, and we shall not take him back agani, 
 for my father does not care, at least at present, to 
 have strangers with us, and I myself do not feel 
 as though I could cook for and look after a young 
 man in the way my stepmother did. Not having 
 one will make us poor, but I think we shall be 
 able to manage quite well, for we do not want 
 much. 
 
 Thank you for your kind letters since the 
 telegram. The ones before that, coming into this 
 serious house filled with the nearness of Death, 
 and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands 
 cruel with scourges, seemed to me so inexpressibly 
 — well, I will not say it ; it is not fair to blame 
 you, who could not know in whose shadow we 
 were sitting, for being preoccupied with the 
 trivialities of living. But letters sent to friends a 
 long way off do sometimes fall into their midst 
 with a rather ghastly clang of discord. It is what 
 yours did. I read them sometimes in the night, 
 watching by my stepmother in the half-dark room 
 during the moments when she had a little peace 
 and was allowed to slip away from torture into 
 sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all 
 it meant and the tremendous sermons it was 
 preaching me, wordless, voiceless sermons, more 
 eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, 
 how far-away your echoes from life and the world 
 seemed ! Distant tinklings of artificialness ; not 
 quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuine 
 burdens ; idle questionings and self-criticisms ; 
 plaints, doubts, and complicated half- veiled
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 125 
 
 reproaches of myself that I should be able to be 
 pleased with a world so worm-eaten, that 1 should 
 still be able to chant my song of life in a major 
 key in a world so manifestly minor and chromatic. 
 These things fell oddly across the gravity of that 
 room. Shadows in a place where everything was 
 clear, cobwebs of unreality where everything was 
 real. They made me sigh, and they made me 
 smile, they were so very black and yet so very 
 little. I used to wonder what that usually excel- 
 lent housemaid Experience is about, that she has 
 not yet been after you with her broom. You 
 know her speciality is the pulling up of blinds 
 and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is 
 unfair to judge you. Your letters since you knew 
 have been kindness itself. Thank you for them. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 It seemed so strange for any one to die in 
 June ; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the 
 wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that 
 quivering radiance of heat. The people below us 
 have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this 
 year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at 
 the open window in the afternoons when the sun 
 was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, in- 
 tense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room 
 with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed 
 tossed my stepmother, muttering ceaselessly to 
 herself of Christ.
 
 XXXV 
 
 Jena, July 15. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Our new address Is 
 Galgenberg, Jena, — rather grim, but what's in a 
 name ? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny- 
 house, white, with green shutters, on the south 
 slope of the hill among apple-trees. The garden 
 is so steep that you can't sit down in it except on 
 the north side of the house, where you can because 
 the house is there to stop you from sliding farther. 
 It is a strip of rough grass out of which I shall 
 make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. 
 There is also a red currant bush, out of which I 
 shall make jelly. At the bottom, below the fence 
 — rotten in places, but I'm going to mend that — • 
 begins a real apple orchard, and through its leaves 
 we can look down on the roof of another house, 
 white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue 
 shutters instead of green. People take it for the 
 summer, and once an Englishman came and made 
 a beanfield there — but I think I told you about 
 the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the 
 slope, are pine trees that brush restlessly back- 
 wards and forwards all day long across the clouds, 
 trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and 
 at night spread themselves out stiff and motionless 
 
 against the stars. I saw them last night from my 
 
 126
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 127 
 
 window. We moved in yesterday. The moving 
 in was not very easy, because of what Papa calls 
 the precipitous nature of the district. He sat 
 with his back propped against the wall of the 
 house on the only side on which, as I have ex- 
 plained, you can sit, and worked with a pencil at 
 his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect 
 placidity while Johanna and I and the man who 
 urged the furniture-cart up the hill kept on 
 stepping over his legs as we went in and out 
 furnishing the house. There was not much to 
 furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to 
 furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, 
 including the canary, which I presented, its cage 
 beautifully tied up with the blue ribbons I wore 
 at my first party, to the little girl with the flame- 
 coloured hair on the second floor. As much of 
 the other things as any one could be induced to 
 buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would 
 buy or endure having given them. And so, 
 pared down, we fit In here quite nicely, and after 
 a day or two conceded to the suavities of life, 
 such as the tacking up in appropriate places of 
 muslin curtains and the tying of them with bows, 
 1 intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and 
 sec what I can do with the garden. 
 
 I wish it were not quite so steep. If I'm not 
 on the upper side of one of the apple-trees, with 
 my back firmly pressed against its trunk, I don't 
 yet see how I am to garden. It must be disturb- 
 ing, and a great waste of time, to have to hold on 
 to something with one hand while you garden
 
 128 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 with the other. And suppose the thing gives 
 way, and you roll down on to the broken fence ? 
 And if that, too, gave way, there would be 
 nothing but a few probably inadequate apple 
 trunks between me and the roof of the house with 
 the blue shutters. I should think it extremely 
 likely that until I've got the mountain-side 
 equivalent for what are known as one's sea-legs I 
 shall very often be on that roof. I hope it is 
 strong and new. Perhaps there are kind people 
 inside who will not mind. Soon they'll get so 
 much used to it that when they hear the prelimi- 
 nary rush among their apple-trees and the crack- 
 ing of the branches, followed by the thud over 
 their heads, they won't even look up from their 
 books, but just murmur to each other, "There's 
 Friiulein Schmidt on the roof again," and go on 
 with their studies. 
 
 Now I'm talking nonsense, and the sort of 
 nonsense you like least ; but I'm in a silly mood 
 to-day, and you must take me as you find me. 
 At any time when I have grown too unendurable 
 you can stop my writing to you simply by not 
 writing to me. Then I shall know you have at 
 last had enough of me, of my moods, of my 
 odious fits of bombastic eloquence, of my still 
 more odious facetiousness, of my scoldings of you, 
 and of my complacency about myself. It is true, 
 you actually seem to like my scoldings. That is 
 very abject of you. What you apparently resent 
 are the letters with sturdy sentiments in them and 
 a robust relish of life. It almost seems as though
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 129 
 
 you didn't want me to be happy. That is very 
 odd of you. And I sometimes wonder if it is 
 possible for two persons to continue friends who 
 have a different taste in what, for want of a nicer 
 word, I must call jokes. My taste in them is so 
 elementary that an apple-pie bed makes me laugh 
 tears, and when I go to the play I love to see 
 chairs pulled away just as people are going to sit 
 down. You, of course, shudder at these things. 
 They fill you with so great a dreariness that it 
 amounts to pain. I am at least sensible enough 
 to understand the attitude. But pleasantries 
 quite high up, as I consider, in the scale of 
 humour have not been able to make you smile. 
 I have seen you sit unalterably grave while Papa 
 was piping out the nicest little things, and I know 
 you never liked even your adored Professor 
 Martens when he began to bubble. Well, either 
 I laugh too easily or you don't laugh enough. I 
 can only repeat that if I set your teeth on edge, 
 the remedy is in your own hands. 
 
 We are going to be vegetarians this summer. 
 Papa, who hasn't tried it yet, is perfectly willing, 
 and if we live chiefly on nuts and lettuces we 
 shall hardly want any money at all. I read 
 Shelley's Vindication of Natural Diet aloud to him 
 before we left the flat to prepare his mind, and he 
 not only heartily agreed with every word, but 
 went at once to the Free Library and dug out all 
 the books he could find about muscles and brains 
 and their surprising dependence on the kind of 
 stuff you have eaten, and brought them home for 
 
 K.
 
 I30 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 me to study. I do love Papa. He falls in so 
 sweetly with one's little plans, and lets me do 
 what I want without the least waste of time in 
 questionings or the giving of advice. I have read 
 the books with profound interest. Only a person 
 who cooks, who has to handle meat when it is 
 raw, pick out the internals of geese, peel off the 
 skins of rabbits, scrape away the scales of a fish 
 that is still alive — my stepmother insisted on this, 
 the flavour, she said, being so infinitely superior 
 that way — can know with what a relief, what a 
 feeling of personal purification and turning of the 
 back on evil, one flings a cabbage into a pot of 
 fair water or lets one's fingers linger lovingly 
 among lentils. I brought a bag of lentils up the 
 hill with us, and the cabbage, remnant of my last 
 marketing, came up too in a net, and we had our 
 dinner to-day of them : lentil soup, and cabbage 
 with bread-and-butter — what could be purer ? 
 And for Johanna, who has not read Shelley, there 
 was the last of the Rauchgasse sausage for the 
 soothing of her more immature soul. 
 
 That was an hour ago, and Papa has just been 
 in to say he is hungry. 
 
 "Why, you've only just had dinner, Papa- 
 chen," said I, surprised. 
 
 " I know — I know," he said, looking vaguely 
 troubled. 
 
 " You can't really be hungry. Perhaps it's 
 indigestion." 
 
 " Perhaps," agreed Papa ; and drifted out 
 again, still looking troubled.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 1 3 1 
 
 Before we took this house it had stood empty 
 for several years, and the man it belongs to was 
 so glad to find somebody who would live in it 
 and keep it warm that he lets us have it for 
 hardly any rent at all. I expect what the im- 
 poverished want — and only the impoverished 
 would live In a thing so small — is a garden flat 
 enough to grow potatoes in, and to have fowls 
 walking about it, and a pig in a nice level sty. 
 You can't have them here. At least, you couldn't 
 have a sty on such a slope. The poor pig would 
 spend his days either anxiously hanging on with 
 all his claws — or is it paws ? I forget what pigs 
 have ; anyhow, with all his might — to the hill- 
 side, or huddled dismally down against the end 
 planks, and never be of that sublime detach- 
 ment of spirit necessary to him if he would end 
 satisfactorily in really fat bacon. And the fowls, 
 I suppose, would have to lay their eggs flying — 
 they certainly couldn't do it sitting down — and 
 how disturbing that would be to a person engaged, 
 as 1 often am, in staring up at the sky, for how 
 can you stare up at the sky under an umbrella ? 
 I asked the landlord about the potatoes, and he 
 said I must grow them as the last tenant did, a 
 widow who lived and died here, in a strip against 
 the north side of the house where there is a level 
 space about two yards running from one end of 
 the house to the other, representing a path and 
 keeping the hill from tumbling in at our windows. 
 It really is the only place, for 1 don't sec how 
 Johanna and I, gifted and resourceful as we
 
 132 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 undoubtedly are, can make terraces with no tools 
 but a spade and a watering-pot ; but it will do 
 away with our only path, and it does seem neces- 
 sary to have a path up to one's front door. Can 
 one be respectable without a path up to one's 
 front door ? Perhaps one can, and that too may 
 be a superfluity to those who face life squarely. 
 I am convinced that there must be potatoes, but 
 I am not convinced, on reflection, that there need 
 be a path. Have you ever felt the joy of getting 
 rid of things ^ It is so great that it is almost 
 ferocious. After each divestment, each casting 
 ofi^ and away, there is such a gasp of relief, such 
 a bounding upwards, the satisfied soul, proud for 
 once of its body, saying to it smilingly, " This, 
 too, then, you have discovered you can do with- 
 out and yet be happy." And 1, just while writ- 
 ing these words to you, have discovered that I 
 can and will do without paths. 
 
 Papa has been in again. " Is it not coffee- 
 time ? " he asked. 
 
 I looked at him amazed. " Darling, coffee- 
 time is never at half-past two," I said reproachfully. 
 
 " Half-past two is it only ? Der Teufel,'' said 
 Papa. 
 
 " Isn't your book getting on well .'' " I 
 inquired. 
 
 " Yes, yes, — the book progresses. That is, it 
 would progress if my attention did not continu- 
 ally wander." 
 
 " Wander ? Where to ? " 
 
 *' Rose-Marie, there is a constant gnawing
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 133 
 
 going on within me that will not permit me to 
 believe that I have dined." 
 
 " Well, but, Papachen, you have. I saw you 
 doing it." 
 
 "What you saw me doing was not dining," 
 said Papa. 
 
 "Not dining.?" 
 
 Papa waved his arms round oddly and 
 suddenly. 
 
 " Grass, grass," he cried with a singular 
 impatience. 
 
 "Grass ? " I echoed, still more amazed. 
 
 " Books of an enduring nature, works of any 
 monumentalness, Cannot, never were, and shall 
 not be raised on a foundation of grass," said Papa, 
 his face quite red. 
 
 " I can't think what you mean," said I. 
 " Where is there any grass } " 
 
 " Here," said Papa, quickly clasping his hands 
 over that portion of him that we boldly talk 
 about and call Magen^ and you allude to sideways, 
 by a variety of devious expressions. "I have been 
 fed to-day," he said, looking at me quite severely, 
 "on a diet appropriate only to the mountain goat, 
 and probably only appropriate to him because he 
 can procure nothing better." 
 
 " Why, you had a lentil soup — proved 
 scientifically to contain all that is needed " 
 
 " I congratulate the lentil soup. I envy it. 
 I wish I too contained all that is needed. But 
 here" — he clasped his hands again — "there is 
 nothing."
 
 134 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 "Yes, there is. There is cabbage." 
 
 " Pooh," said Papa. " Green stuff. Herbage." 
 
 " Herbage .? " 
 
 "And scanty herbage, too — appropriate, I 
 suppose, to the mountainous region in which we 
 now find ourselves." 
 
 " Papa, don't you want to be a vegetarian ? " 
 
 "I want my coffee," said Papa. 
 
 " What, now .? " 
 
 *' And why not now, Rose-Marie ? Is there 
 anything more rational than to eat when one is 
 hungry ? Let there, pray, be much — very much 
 — bread-and-butter with it." 
 
 "But, Papa, we weren't g^ng to have coffee 
 any more. Didn't you agree that we would give 
 up stimulants .? " 
 
 Papa looked at me defiantly. " I did," he said. 
 
 " Well, coffee is one." 
 
 " It is our only one." 
 
 " You said you would give it up." 
 
 " I said gradually. To do so to-day would 
 not be doing so gradually. Nothing is good that 
 is not done gradually." 
 
 "But one must begin." 
 
 " One must begin gradually." 
 
 " You were delighted with Shelley." 
 
 " It was after dinner." 
 
 " You were quite convinced." 
 
 ** I was not hungry." 
 
 "You know he is all for pure water." 
 
 " He is all for many things that seem admirable 
 to those who have lately dined."
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 135 
 
 "You know he says that if the populace of 
 Paris at the time of the Revolution had drunk at 
 the pure source of the Seine " 
 
 "There is no pure source of the Seine within 
 reach of the populace of Paris. There would 
 only be cats. Dead cats. And cats interspersed, 
 no doubt, with a variety of objects of the nature 
 of portions of crockery and empty tins." 
 
 " But he says pure source." 
 
 " Then he says pure nonsense." 
 
 " He says if they had done that and satisfied 
 their hunger at the ever-furnished table of 
 vegetable nature " 
 
 " Ever-furnished table ? Holy Heaven — the 
 good, the excellent young man." 
 
 " — they would never have lent their brutal 
 suffrage to the proscription list of Robespierre." 
 
 " Rose-Marie, to-day I care not what this 
 young man says." 
 
 " He says — look, I've got the book in my 
 pocket " 
 
 " I will not look." 
 
 " He says, could a set of men whose passions 
 were not perverted by unnatural stimuli — that's 
 coffee, of course — gaze with coolness on an nu/o- 
 
 " I engage to gaze with heat on any aiilo-da-fi 
 I may encounter if only you will quickly " 
 
 " He says " 
 
 "Put down the book, Rose-Marie, and see to 
 the getting of coffee." 
 
 " But he says "
 
 136 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Let him say it, and see to the coffee." 
 
 " He says, is it to be believed that a 
 being of gentle feelings rising from his meal of 
 roots " 
 
 " Go//, Go//, — meal of roots ! " 
 
 " — would take delight in sports of blood ? " 
 
 " Enough. I am not in the temper for 
 Shelley ? " 
 
 " But you quite loved him a day or two 
 ago." 
 
 *' Except food, nobody loves anything — any- 
 thing at all — while his stomach is empty." 
 
 " I don't think that's very pretty, Papa- 
 chen." 
 
 "But it is a great truth. Remember it if you 
 should marry. Shape your conduct by its light. 
 Three times every day, Rose-Marie — that is, 
 before breakfast, before dinner, and before supper, 
 — no husband loves any wife. She may be as 
 beautiful as the stars, as wise as Pallas-Athene, as 
 cultured as Goethe, as entertaining as a circus, 
 as affectionate as you please — he cares nothing 
 for her. She exists not. Go, my child, and 
 prepare the coffee, and let the bread-and-butter be 
 cut thick." 
 
 Well, since then I have been cutting bread- 
 and-butter and pouring out cups of coffee. I 
 thought Papa would never leave off. If that is 
 the effect of a vegetarian dinner, I don't think it 
 can really be less expensive than meat. Papa ate 
 half a pound of butter, which is sixty pfennings, 
 and for sixty pfennings I could have bought him
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 137 
 
 a Kalbsschnitxel so big that it would have lasted, 
 under treatment, two days. I must go for a wallc 
 and think, it out. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXXVI 
 
 Galgenberg, July 2 1 . 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I assure you that 
 we have all we want, so do not, please, go on 
 feeling distressed about us. "Why should you 
 feel distressed .<* I am not certain that I do not 
 resent it. Put baldly (you will say brutally), you 
 have no right to be distressed, uneasy, anxious, 
 and all the other things you say you are, about 
 the private concerns of persons who are nothing 
 to you. Even a lamb might conceivably feel 
 nettled by persistent pity when it knows it has 
 everything in the world it wants. Come now, if 
 it is a question of pity, we will have it in the 
 right place, and I will pity you. There is always, 
 you know, a secret satisfaction in the soul of him 
 who pities. He does hug himself, and whether 
 he does it consciously or unconsciously de- 
 pends on his aptitude for clear self-criticism. 
 Compared with yours 1 deliberately consider my 
 life glorious. And when will you see that there 
 are~kinds of gloriousness that cannot be measured 
 in money or position } It is plain to me — and 
 it would be so to you if you thought it over — 
 that the less one has the more one enjoys. We 
 
 want space, time, concentration, for getting at the 
 
 138
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 1 39 
 
 true sweet root of life. And I think — and you 
 probably do not — that the true sweet root of life 
 is in any one thing, no matter what thing, on 
 which your whole undisturbed attention Is fixed. 
 Once I read a little French story, years ago, with 
 my mother, when I was a child, and I don't know 
 now who wrote it or what it was called. It was 
 the story of a prisoner who found a plant growing 
 between the flags of the court he might walk In, 
 and I think it was a wallflower ; and It, unfolding 
 itself slowly and putting out one tender bit of 
 green after the other In that grey and stony place, 
 stretched out little hands of life and hope and 
 interest to the man who had come there a lost 
 soul. It was the one thing he had. It ended by 
 being his passion. With nothing else to distract 
 him, he could study all its wonders. From that 
 single plant he learned more than the hurried 
 passer-on, free of the treasures of the universe, 
 learns in a life. It saved him from despair. It 
 broufjht him back to the eao^er interest in the 
 marvellous world that soul feels which is unen- 
 cumbered by too heavy a weight of trappings. 
 Why, I still have too much ; and here are you 
 pitying me because I have not more when I am 
 distracted by all the claims on my attention. I 
 can look at whole beds of wallflowers every spring, 
 and pass on with nothing but a vague admiration 
 for their massed beauty of scent and colour. I 
 get nothing out of them but just that transient 
 glimpse and whifl'^ There are too many. There 
 is no time for them all. But shut me up for
 
 I40 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 weeks alone with one of them in a pot, and I too 
 would get out of it the measure of the height and 
 the depth and the wonder of life. 
 
 And then you exhort me not to live on 
 vegetables. Is it because you live on meat ? 
 I don't think 1 mind your eating meat, so why 
 should you mind my eating vegetables ? I have 
 done it for a week now quite steadily, and mean 
 to give it at least a fair trial. If what the books 
 we have got about it say is true, health and 
 sanity lie that way. And how delightful to have 
 a pure kitchen into which ghastly ciead things 
 never come. I will not be a partaker of the 
 nature of beasts. I will not become three parts 
 pig, or goose, or foolish sheep. I turn with 
 aversion from the reddened horror called gravy. 
 I consider it a monstrous ugly thing to have 
 particles of pig rioting up and down my veins, 
 turning into brains, colouring my thoughts, be- 
 coming a very part of my body. Surely a 
 body is a wonderful thing.-* So wonderful that 
 it cannot be treated with too much care and 
 respect ? So wonderful that it cannot be too 
 carefully guarded from corruption ? And have 
 you ever studied the appearance and habits of 
 pigs ? 
 
 But I do admit that being a vegetarian is 
 bewildering. None of the books say a word 
 about the odd feeling one has of not having had 
 anything to eat. What Papa felt that first day 
 I have felt every day since. I am perpetually 
 hungry ; and it is the unpleasant hunger that
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 141 
 
 expresses Itself in a dislike for food, In listless- 
 ness, inability to work, flabbiness, even faintness. 
 At eight In the morning I begin with bread and 
 plums. My entire being cries out while 1 am 
 eating them for coffee with milk In It and butter 
 on my bread. But coffee Is a stimulant, and the 
 books say that butter contains no nourishment 
 whatever, and since what I most yearn for Is to 
 be nourished I will waste no time eating stuff that 
 doesn't do It. Instead, I eat heaps of bread and 
 stacks of plums, not because I want to, but 
 because I'm afraid the gnawing feeling will follow 
 sooner than ever if I don't. Papa sits opposite 
 me, breakfasting pleasantly on eggs, for he ex- 
 plains he is doing things gradually, and Is using 
 the eggs to build wise bridges across the gulf 
 between the end of meat and the beginning of 
 what he persists in describing as herbage. At 
 nine I feel as If I had had no breakfast. All the 
 pains I took to get through the bread were of no 
 real use. I struggle against this for as long as 
 possible, because the books say you mustn't have 
 things between meals, and then I go and eat more 
 plums. I am amazed when I remember that 
 once I liked plums. No words can express my 
 abhorrence of them now. But what is to be 
 done ? They are the only fruit we can get. 
 Cherries are over. Apples have not begun. 
 We buy the plums from the neighbour down the 
 hill. To add to my horror of them, 1 have 
 discovered that hardly one is without a wriggly 
 live thing inside it. I wonder how many of
 
 142 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 them I have eaten. Can they be brought into 
 the category vegetarian ? Papa says yes, because 
 they have lived and moved and had their being 
 in an atmosphere of pure plum. They are plum, 
 says Papa, consoling me — bits of plum that have 
 acquired the power to walk about. But according 
 to that beef must be vcGfCtarian too — so much 
 grass grown able to walk about. It is very 
 bewildering. One day the neighbour — he is a 
 nice neighbour, interested in our experiment — 
 sent us some raspberries, a basket of them, all 
 glowing, and downy, and delicious with dew, and 
 covered with a beautiful silvery cabbage leaf; but 
 they were afflicted in just the same way, only 
 more so. Papa says, why do I look } 1 must 
 look now that I have seen the things once ; and 
 so the end of the raspberries was that most of 
 them went out into the kitchen, and Johanna, 
 who has no prejudices, stewed them into compot 
 and ate them, including the inhabitants, for her 
 supper. 
 
 For dinner, by which time I am curiously 
 shaky, quite indifferent to food, and possessed of 
 an immense longing to lie down on a sofa and do 
 nothing, we have salad and potatoes and fruit — 
 of course plums — and lentils because they are so 
 good for us (it is a pity they are also so nasty), 
 and cheese because one book says (it is an extra- 
 ordinarily convincing book) that if a man shall 
 eat beef steadily for a whole morning from six 
 to twelve without stopping, he will not at the 
 end have taken in half the nourishing matter that;
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 143 
 
 he would have absorbed after two minutes laid 
 out judiciously on cheese. Unfortunately I don't 
 like cheese. After dinner I shut myself up with 
 the works of Mr. Eustace Miles, which tell me 
 in invigorating language of all the money, time, 
 and energy I have saved, of my increase of bodily 
 health, of how active I am getting, how skilful 
 and of what a tough endurance, how my brains 
 have grown clear and nimble, my morals risen 
 high above the average, and how keen my enjoy- 
 ment of everything has become, including, strange 
 to say, my food. I read lying down, too spiritless 
 to sit up ; and Johanna in the kitchen, who has 
 dined on pig and beer, washes up with the clatter 
 of exuberant energy, singing while she does so in 
 a voice that shakes the house that once she liebte 
 ein Student. 
 
 It is very bewildering. The advice one gets 
 points in such opposite directions. For instance, 
 the neighbour made friends the very first evening 
 with Papa, who walked with injudicious inatten- 
 tion in our garden and slipped down through a 
 gap in the fence into his orchard and his arms, he 
 being engaged in picking up the fallen plums for 
 his wife to make jam of ; and he told me, when 
 he came in one day at dinner and found me 
 struggling through what he considered dark ways 
 and 1 thought were cabbages, that my salvation 
 lay in almonds. I went down to Jena that after- 
 noon and bought three pounds of them. They 
 were dear, and dreadfully heavy to carry up the 
 hill, and when I was panting past the neighbour's
 
 144 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 pate his wife, a friendly lady who reads right 
 through the advertisements in the paper every 
 morning and spends her evenings with a pencil 
 working out the acrostics, was standing at it cool 
 and comfortable ; and she asked me, with the 
 simple inquisitiveness natural to our nation, what 
 I had got in my parcel ; and I, glad to stop a 
 moment and get my breath, told her ; and she 
 immediately scoffed both at her husband and at 
 the almonds, and said if I ate them I would lay 
 up for myself an old age steeped in a dreadful 
 thing called xanthin poison. I went home and 
 consulted the books. The neighbour's wife was 
 right. Johanna made macaroons of the almonds, 
 and Papa, who loves macaroons, chose to disbelieve 
 the neighbour's wife and ate them. 
 
 But the books are not always so unanimous 
 as they were about this. One exhorted us to eat 
 many peas and beans, which we were cheerfully 
 doing — for are they not in summer pleasant 
 things ? — when I read in another that we might 
 as well eat poison, so full were they, too, of 
 qualities ending in xanthin poison. Lentils, re- 
 commended warmly by most books, are dis- 
 countenanced by two because they make you fat. 
 Rice has shared the same condemnation. Lettuces 
 we may eat, but without the oil that soothes and 
 the vinegar that interests, and if you add salt to 
 them you will be thirsty, and you must never 
 drink. An undressed lettuce — a quite naked 
 lettuce — is a very dull thing. Really, I would as 
 soon eat grass. We do refuse at present to follow
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 145 
 
 this cruel advice, and have salad every day in 
 defiance of it, but my conscience forces me to put 
 less and less dressing in it each time, hoping that 
 so shall we wean ourselves from the craving for 
 it — " gradually," as Papa says. Carrots, too, the 
 books warn us against. I forget what it is they 
 do to you that is serious, but the neighbour told 
 me they make your skin shine, and since he told 
 me that no carrot has crossed our threshold. 
 Apples we may eat, but we are not to suppose 
 that they will nourish us ; they are useful only 
 for preventing, by their bulk, the walls of our 
 insides from coming together. The walls of the 
 vegetarian inside are very apt to come together if 
 the owner strikes out all the things he is warned 
 against from his menu, and then it is, when they 
 are about to do that, that fibrous bulk, most con- 
 venient in this form, should be applied ; and, like 
 the roasted Sunday goose of our fleshlier days in 
 Rauchgasse, the vegetarian goes about stuffed 
 with apples. Meanwhile there are no apples, and 
 I know not whither I must turn in search of bulk. 
 Do you think that in another week I shall be 
 strong enough to write to you ? 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXXVII 
 
 Galgenbcrg, July 28. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — This is a most sweet 
 
 evening, dripping, quiet, after a rainy day, with a 
 
 strip of clear yellow slcy behind the pine trees on 
 
 the crest of the hill. I gathered up my skirts 
 
 and went down through the soaked grass to where 
 
 against the fence there is a divine straggly bush 
 
 of pink China roses. I wanted to see how they 
 
 were getting on after their drenching ; and as I 
 
 stood looking at them in the calm light, the fence 
 
 at the back of them sodden into dark greens and 
 
 blacks that showed up every leaf and lovely loose 
 
 wet flower, a robin came and sat on the fence near 
 
 me and began to sing. You will say : Well, what 
 
 next ? And there isn't any next ; at least, not a 
 
 next that I am likely to make understandable. It 
 
 was only that I felt extraordinarily happy. You 
 
 will say : But why ? And if I were to explain, 
 
 at the end you would still be saying Why ^ 
 
 Well, you cannot see my face while 1 am writing 
 
 to you, so that I have been able often to keep 
 
 what I was really thinking safely covered up ; but 
 
 you mustn't suppose that my letters have always 
 
 exactly represented my state of mind, and that 
 
 146
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 147 
 
 my soul has made no pilgrimages during this half 
 year. I think it has wandered thousands of 
 miles. And often while I wrote scolding you, or 
 was being wise and complacent, or sprightly and 
 offensive, often just then the tired feet of it 
 were bleeding most as they stumbled among the 
 bitter stones. And this evening I felt that the 
 stones were at an end, that my soul has come 
 home to me again, securely into my keeping, glad 
 to be back, and that there will be no more effort 
 needed when I look life serenely in the face* 
 Till now there was always effort. That I talk to 
 you about it is the surest sign that it is over. 
 The robin's singing, the clear light behind the 
 pines, the dripping trees and bushes, the fragrance 
 of the wet roses, the little white house, so modest 
 and hidden, where Papa and I are going to be 
 happy, the perfect quiet after a stormy day, the 
 perfect peace after discordant months — oh, I 
 wanted to say thank you for each of these 
 beautiful things. Do you remember you gave 
 me a book of Ernest Dowson's poems on the 
 birthday I had while you were with us ? And do 
 you remember his — 
 
 Now I will lalcc mc to a place of peace, 
 
 Forget my heart's desire — 
 
 In solitiuic and prayer work out my soul's release ? 
 
 It is what I feel I have done. 
 
 But I will not bore you with these sentiments. 
 See, 1 am always anxious to get back quickly to 
 the surface of things, anxious to skim lightly over
 
 148 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 the places where tears, happy or miserable, lie, and 
 not to touch with so much as the brush of a wing 
 the secret tendernesses of the soul. Let us, sir, get 
 back to vegetables. They are so safe as subjects 
 for polite letter-writing. And I have had three 
 letters from you this week condemning their use 
 with all the fervour the English language places 
 at your disposal — really it is generous to you in 
 this respect — as a substitute for the mixed diet of 
 the ordinary Philistine. Yes, sir, I regard you as 
 an ordinary Philistine ; and if you want to know 
 what that in my opinion is, it is one who walks 
 along in the ruts he found ready instead of, after 
 sitting on a milestone and taking due thought, 
 making his own ruts for himself. You are one 
 of a flock ; and you disapprove of sheep like my- 
 self that choose to wander off and browse alone. 
 You condemn all my practices. Nothing that I 
 think or do seems good in your eyes. You tell 
 me roundly that I am selfish, and accuse me, not 
 roundly because you are afraid it might be in- 
 decorous, but obliquely, in a mask of words that 
 does not for an instant hide your meaning, of 
 wearing Jaeger garments beneath my outer apparel. 
 Soon, I gather you expect, I shall become a 
 spiritualist and a social democrat ; and quite soon 
 after that I suppose you are sure I shall cut off 
 my hair and go about in sandals. Well, I'll tell 
 you something that may keep you quiet : Pm 
 tired of vegetarianism. It isn't that I crave for 
 fleshpots, for I shall continue as before to turn 
 my back on them, on " the boiled and roast. The
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 149 
 
 heated nose in face of ghost," but I grudge the 
 time it takes and the thought it takes. For the 
 fortnight I have followed its precepts I have lived 
 more entirely for my body than in any one fort- 
 night of my life. It was all body. I could think 
 of nothing else. I was tending it the whole day. 
 Instead of growing, as I had fondly hoped, so free 
 in spirit that I would be able to draw quite close 
 to the Hebe Gott^ I was sunk in a pit of indifference 
 to everything needing effort or enthusiasm. And 
 it is not simple after all. Shelley's meal of roots 
 sounds easy and elementary, but think of the 
 exertion of going out, strengthened only by other 
 roots, to find more for your next meal. Nuts 
 and fruits, things that require no cooking, really 
 were elaborate nuisances, the nuts having to be 
 cracked and the fruit freed from what Papa called 
 its pedestrian portions. And they were so useless 
 even then to a person who wanted to go out and 
 dig in the garden. All they could do for me was 
 to make me appreciate sofas. I am tired of it, 
 tired of wasting precious time thinking about and 
 planning my wretched diet. Yesterday I had an 
 ^'g% for breakfast — it gave me one of Pater's 
 "exquisite moments" — and a heavenly bowl of 
 coffee with milk in it, and the effect was to send 
 mc out singing into the garden and to start me 
 mending the fence. The neighbour came up to 
 see what the vigorous hammer-strokes and snatches 
 of Siegfried could mean, and when he saw it was 
 I immediately called out — 
 
 " You have been eating meat 1 "
 
 ISO FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " 1 have not," 1 said, swinging my hammer to 
 show what eggs and milk can do. 
 
 " In some form or other you have this day 
 joined yourself to the animal kingdom," he per- 
 sisted ; and when 1 told him about my breakfast 
 he wiped his hands (he had been picking fruit) 
 and shook mine and congratulated me. " I have 
 watched with concern," he said, " your eyes be- 
 coming daily bigger. It is not good when eyes 
 do that. Now they will shrink to their normal 
 size, and you will at last set your disgraceful 
 garden in order. Are you aware that the grass 
 ought to have been made into hay a month ago .'' " 
 
 He is a haggard man, thin of cheek, round of 
 shoulder, short of sight, who teaches little boys 
 Latin and Greek in Weimar. For thirty years 
 has he taught them, eking out his income in the 
 way we all do in these parts, by taking in foreigners 
 wanting to learn German. In July he shakes his 
 foreigners off and comes up here for six weeks' 
 vacant pottering In his orchard. He bought the 
 house as a speculation, and lets the upper part to 
 any one who will take it, living himself, with his 
 wife and son, on the ground floor. He is ex- 
 tremely kind to me, and has given me to under- 
 stand that he considers me intelligent, so of 
 course I like him. Only those persons who love 
 intelligence in others and have doubts about their 
 own know the deliciousness of being told a thing 
 like that. I adore being praised. I am athirst 
 for it. Dreadfully vain down in my heart, I go 
 about pretending a fine aloofness from such
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 151 
 
 weakness, so that when nobody sees anything In 
 me — and nobody ever does — I may at least make 
 a show of not having expected them to. Thus 
 does a girl in a ball-room with whom no one will 
 dance pretend she does not want to. Thus did the 
 familiar fox conduct himself towards the grapes 
 of tradition. Very well do I know there is 
 nothing to praise ; but because I am just clever 
 enough to know that I am not clever, to be told 
 that • I am clever — do you follow me ? — sets me 
 tinorling. 
 
 Now, that's enough about me. Let us talk 
 about you. You must not come to Jena. What 
 could have put such an idea into your head ? It 
 is a blazing, deserted place just now, looking from 
 the top of the hills like a basin of hot bouillon 
 down there in the hollow, wrapped in its steam. 
 The University is shut up. The professors 
 scattered. Martens is in Switzerland, and won't 
 be back till September. Even the Schmidts, those 
 interesting people, have flapped up with screams 
 of satisfaction into a nest on the side of a precipice. 
 1 urge you with all my elder-sisterly authority to 
 stay where you are. Plainly, if you were to come, 
 I would not see you. Oh, I will leave off pre- 
 tending I cannot imagine what you want here : 
 I know you want to see me. Well, you shall 
 not. Why you should want to is altogether beyond 
 my comprehension. I believe you have come to 
 regard me as a sort of medicine, medicine of the 
 tonic order, and wish to bring your sick soul to 
 the very place where it is dispensed. IJut I, you
 
 152 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 see, will have nothing to do with sick souls, and 
 I wholly repudiate the idea of being somebody's 
 physic. I will not be your physic. What medi- 
 cinal properties you can extract from my letters 
 you are welcome to ; but, pray, are you mad that 
 you should think of coming here ? When you 
 do come you are to come with your wife, and 
 when you have a wife you are not to come at all. 
 How simple. 
 
 Really, I feel inclined to laugh when I try to 
 picture you, after the life you have been leading 
 in London, after the days you are living now at 
 Clinches, attempting to arrange yourself on this 
 perch of ours up here. I cannot picture you. 
 We have reduced our existence to the crudest 
 elements, to the raw material ; and you, I know, 
 have grown a very exquisite young man. The 
 fact is you have had time to forget what we are 
 really like, my father and I and Johanna, and 
 since my stepmother's time we have advanced far 
 in the casual scappiness of housekeeping that we 
 love. You would be like some strange and 
 splendid bird in the midst of three extremely 
 shabby sparrows. That is the physical point of 
 view : a thing to be laughed at. From the moral 
 it is for ever impossible. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XXXVIII 
 
 Galgenberg, Aug. 7. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — It is pleasant of you 
 to take the trouble to emulate our neighbour 
 and tell me that you too think me intelligent. 
 You put it, it is true, more elaborately than he 
 does, with a greater embroidery of fine words, but 
 I will try to believe you equally sincere. I make 
 you a profound Knix — it's a more expressive word 
 than curtsey — of polite gratitude. But it is less 
 excellent of you to add on the top of these praises 
 that I am adorable. With words like that, inap- 
 propriate, and to me eternally unconvincing, this 
 correspondence will come to an abrupt end. I 
 shall not write again if that is how you are going 
 to play the game. I would not write now if I 
 were less indifferent. As it is, I can look on with 
 perfect calm, most serenely unmoved by anything 
 in that direction you may say to me ; but if you 
 care to have letters, do not say them again. I 
 shall never choose to allow you to suppose 
 me vile. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 '53
 
 XXXIX 
 
 Galgenburg, Aug. 1 3. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — You need not have 
 sent me so many pages of protestations. Nothing 
 you can say will persuade me that I am adorable, 
 and I did exactly mean the word vile. Do not 
 quarrel with Miss Cheriton ; but if you must, do 
 not tell me about it. Why should you always 
 want to tell one of us about the other ? Have 
 you no sense of what is fit.-* I am nothing to 
 you, and I will not hear these things. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 154
 
 XL 
 
 Galgenberg, Aug. i8. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — You must really write 
 a book. Write a very long one, with plenty of 
 room for all your words. What is your bill for 
 postage now .'' Johanna, I am sure, thinks you 
 are sending me instalments of manuscript, and 
 marvels at the extravagance that shuts it up in 
 envelopes instead of leaving its ends open and 
 tying it up with string. Once more I must beg 
 you not to write about Miss Cheriton. It is 
 useless to remind me that I have posed as your 
 sister, and that to your sister you may confide 
 anything, because I am not your sister. Some- 
 times 1 have written of an elder-sisterly attitude 
 towards you, but that, of course, was only talk. 
 I am not irascible enough for the position. I do 
 think, though, you ought to be surrounded by 
 women who are cross. Six cross and determined 
 elder sisters would do wonders for you. And so 
 would a mother with an iron will. And perhaps 
 an aunt living in the house might be a good 
 thing ; one of those aunts — I believe sufficiently 
 abundant — who pierce your soul with their eyes 
 and then describe it minutely at meal-times in the 
 
 »55
 
 156 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTPIRR 
 
 presence of the family, expatiating particularly on 
 what those corners of it look like, those corners 
 you thought so secret, in which are huddled your 
 dearest faults. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XLl 
 
 Galgenberg, Aug. 25. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Very well; I won't 
 quarrel ; I will be friends — friends, that is, so 
 long as you allow me to be so in the only right 
 and possible way. Don't murder too many 
 grouse. Think of my disapproving scowl when 
 you are beginning to do it, and then perhaps your 
 day of slaughter will resolve itself into an innocent 
 picnic on the moors, alone with sky and heather 
 and a bored, astonished dog. Are you not glad 
 now that you went to Scotland instead of coming 
 to Jena to find the Schmidts not at home ^ Surely 
 long days in the heather by yourself will do much 
 towards making you friends with life. I think 
 those moors must be so beautiful. Really, very 
 nearly as good as my Galgenberg. My Galgen- 
 berg, by the by, has left off being quite so 
 admirably solitary as it was at first. The neigh- 
 bour is, as I told you, extremely friendly, so is 
 his wife, though 1 do not set such store by her 
 friendliness as I do by his, for, frankly, I find 
 men are best ; and they have a son who is an 
 /Issessor in Berlin. You know what an Assessor is, 
 don't you } — it is a person who will presently be 
 
 157
 
 158 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 a handrath. And you know what a Landrath 
 is ? It's what you are before you turn into a 
 Rcgicrungsrath. And a Regierungsrath is what you 
 are before you are a Gehcimrath, And a Geheim- 
 rathy if he lives long enough and doesn't irritate 
 anybody in authority, becomes ultimately that 
 impressive and glorious being a Wirklichcr Geheim- 
 7'ath — implying that before he was only in fun — 
 mit dem Pradikat Excellenz. And don't say I don't 
 explain nicely, because I do. Well, where was 
 I ? Oh yes ; at the son. Well, he appeared a 
 fortnight ago, brown and hot and with a knapsack, 
 having walked all the way from Berlin, and is 
 spending his holiday with his people. For a day 
 or two I thought him quite ordinary. He made 
 rather silly jokes, and wore a red tie. Then one 
 evening I heard lovely sounds, lovely, floating, 
 mellow sounds coming up in floods through the 
 orchard into my garden, where I was propped 
 against a tree-trunk, watching a huge yellow moon 
 disentangling itself slowly from the mists of Jena, 
 — oh, but exquisite sounds, sounds that throbbed 
 into your soul and told it all it wanted to hear, 
 showed it the way to all it was looking for, talked 
 to it wonderfully of the possibilities of life. First 
 they drew me on to my feet, then they drew me 
 down the garden, then through the orchard, 
 nearer and nearer, till at last I stood beneath the 
 open window they were coming from, listening 
 with all my ears. Against the wall I leaned, 
 holding my breath, spell-bound, forced to ponder 
 great themes, themes of life and death, the music
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 159 
 
 falling like drops of liquid light in dark and 
 thirsty places. I don't know how long it lasted 
 or how long I stood there after it was finished, 
 but some one came to the window and put his 
 head out into the freshness, and what do you 
 think he said ? He said, ^^ Donnerivetter^ wie man 
 im Zimtner schivitzt.'" And it was the son, brown 
 and hot, and with a red tie. 
 
 "Ach, Friiulein Schmidt," said he, s-uddenly 
 perceiving me. " Good evening. A fine evening. 
 I did not know I had an audience." 
 
 "Yes," said I, unable at once to adjust myself 
 to politenesses. 
 
 " Do you like music ? " 
 
 "Yes," said I, still vibrating. 
 
 " It is a good violin. I picked it up " And 
 
 he told me a great many things that I did not 
 hear, for how can you hear when your spirit 
 refuses to come back from its journeyings among 
 the stars ? 
 
 " Will you not enter } " he said at last. " My 
 mother is fetching up some beer and will be here 
 in a moment. It makes one warm playing." 
 
 But I would not enter. I walked back slowly 
 through the long orchard grass between the apple- 
 trees. The moon gleamed along the branches. 
 The bratichcs were weighed down with apples. 
 The place was full of the smell of fruit, of the 
 smell of fruit fallen into the grass, that had lain 
 there bruised all day in the sun. I think the 
 beauty of the world is crushing. Often it seems 
 almost unbearable, calling out such an acuteness
 
 i6o FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 of sensation, such a vivid, leaping sensitiveness of 
 feeling, that indeed it is like pain. 
 
 But what I want to talk about is the strange 
 way good things come out of evil. It really 
 almost makes you respect and esteem the bad 
 things, doing it with an intelligent eye fixed on 
 the future. Here is our young friend down the 
 hill, a young man most ordinary in every way but 
 one, so ordinary that I think we must put him 
 under the heading bad, taking bad in the sense of 
 negation, of want of good ; here he is, robust of 
 speech, fond of beer, red of tie, chosen as her 
 temple by that delicate lady the Muse of melody. 
 Apparently she is not very particular about her 
 temples. It is true, while he is playing at her 
 dictation she transforms him wholly, and I suppose 
 she does not care what he is like in between. But 
 I do. I care because in between he thinks it 
 pleasant to entertain me with facetiousness, his 
 mother hanging fondly on every word in the 
 amazing way mothers, often otherwise quite intelli- 
 gent persons, do. Since that first evening he has 
 played every evening, and his taste in music is as 
 perfect as it is bad in everything else. It is severe, 
 exquisite, exclusive. It is the taste that plays 
 Mozart and Bach and Beethoven, and wastes no 
 moments with the Mendelssohn sugar or the lesser 
 inspiration of Brahms. I tried to strike illumina- 
 tion out of him on these points, wanted to hear 
 his reasons for a greater exclusiveness than I have 
 yet met, went through a string of impressive names, 
 beginning with Schumann and ending with Wagner
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER i6i 
 
 and Tchaikowsky, but he showed no interest, and 
 no Intelligence either, unless a shrug of the shoulder 
 is intelligent. It is true he remarked one day that 
 he found life too short for anything but the best 
 — "That is why," he added, unable to forbear 
 from wit, " I only drink Pilsner." 
 
 " What ? " I cried, ignoring the Pilsner, " and 
 do not these great men " — again I ran through a 
 string of them — " do not they also belong to the 
 very best ? " 
 
 "No," he said ; and would say no more. So, 
 you see, he is obstinate as well as narrow-minded. 
 
 Of course such exclusiveness in art is narrow- 
 minded, isn't it ? Besides, it is very possible he is 
 wrong. You, I know, used to perch Brahms on 
 one of the highest peaks of Parnassus (I never 
 thought there was quite room enough for him on 
 it) ; and did you not go three times all the way to 
 Munich while you were with us to hear Mottl 
 conduct the Ring? Surely it is probable a person 
 of your all-round good taste is a better judge than 
 a person of his very nearly all-round bad taste ? 
 Whatever your faults may be, you never made a 
 fault in ties, never clamoured almost ceaselessly 
 for drink, never talked about schiviizeUy nor enter- 
 tained young women from next door with the 
 tricks and tacetiousncss of a mountebank. 1 
 wonder if his system were carried into literature, 
 and life were wholly concentrated on the half- 
 dozen absolutely best writers, so that wc who 
 spread our attention out thin over areas I am 
 certain are much too wide knew them as we 
 
 M
 
 i62 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 never can know them, became part of them, 
 lived with them and in them, saw through their 
 eyes and thought with their thoughts, whether 
 there would be gain or loss ? I don't know. 
 Tell me what you think. If I might only have 
 the six mightiest books to go with me through 
 life I would certainly have to learn Greek because 
 of Homer. But when it comes to the very 
 mightiest, I cannot even get my six ; I can only 
 get four. Of course when 1 loosely say six books 
 1 mean the works of six writers. But beyond my 
 four I cannot get ; there must be a slight drop 
 for the other two — very slight, hardly a drop, 
 rather a slight downward quiver into a radiance 
 the faintest degree less blazing, but still a degree 
 less. These two would be Milton and Virgil. 
 The other four — but you know the other four 
 without my telling you. I am not sure that the 
 Assessor is not right, and that one cannot, in 
 matters of the spirit, be too exclusive. Exclusive- 
 ness means concentration, deeper study, minuter 
 knowledge ; for we only have a handful of years 
 to do anything in, and they are quite surely not 
 enough to go round when going round means 
 taking in the whole world. 
 
 On the other hand, wouldn't my speech 
 become archaic? I'm afraid I would have a 
 tendency that would grow to address Papa in 
 blank verse. My language, even when praying 
 him at breakfast to give me butter, would be 
 incorrigibly noble. I don't think Papa would 
 like it. And what would he say to a daughter
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 163 
 
 who was forced by stress of concentration on six 
 works to go through life without Goethe ? Goethe, 
 you observe, was not one of the two less glorious, 
 and he certainly was not one of the four com- 
 pletely glorious. I begin to fear I should miss a 
 great deal by my exclusions. It would be sad to 
 die without ever having been thrilled by Werther^ 
 exalted by Faust^ amazed by the Wahlverwandt- 
 schaften^ sent to sleep by Wilhelm Meister. To die 
 innocent of any knowledge of Schiller's Glocke^ 
 with no memory of strenuous hours spent getting 
 it by heart at school, might be quite pleasant. 
 But I think it would end by being tiring to be 
 screwed up perpetually to the pitch of the greatest 
 men's greatest moments. Such heights are not 
 for insects like myself. I would hang very dis- 
 mally, with drooping head and wings, on those 
 exalted hooks. And has not the soul too its 
 longings at times for a dressing-gown and 
 slippers } And do you see how you could do 
 without Boswcll } 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schimdt.
 
 XLII 
 
 Galgenberg, Aug. 31. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Yes, of course he 
 does. He plays every evening. And every 
 evening I go and listen, either in the orchard 
 beneath the open window or, more ceremoniously, 
 inside the room with or without Papa. I find it 
 a pleasant thing. I am living in a bath of music. 
 And I hope you don't expect me to agree with 
 your criticism of music as a stirrer-up of, on the 
 whole, second-rate emotions. What are second- 
 rate emotions ? Are they the ones that you 
 have .'' And was it to have them stirred that you 
 used to journey so often to Munich and Mottl ? 
 Stirred up I certainly am. Not in the way, I 
 admit, in which a poem of Milton's does it, not 
 affected in the least as I am affected by, for 
 instance, the piled-up majesty of the poem on 
 'Timey but if less nobly still very effectually. 
 There ; I have apparently begun to agree with 
 you. Well, I do see, the moment I begin to 
 consider, that what is stirred is less noble. I do 
 see that what I feel when I listen to music is 
 chiefly IVehmuthy and I don't think much of 
 
 Wehmuth. You have no word for it. Perhaps 
 
 164.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 165 
 
 in England you do not have just that form of 
 sentiment. It is a forlorn thing, made up mostly 
 of vague ingredients — vague yearnings, vague 
 regrets, vague dissatisfactions. When it comes 
 over you, you remember all the people who are 
 absent, and you are sad ; and the people who are 
 dead, and you sigh ; and the times you have been 
 naughty, and you groan. I do see that a senti- 
 ment that makes you do that is not the highest. 
 It is profitless, sterile. It doesn't send you on 
 joyfully to the next thing, but keeps you lingering 
 in the dust of churchyards, barren places of the 
 past which should never be revisited by the 
 wholesome-minded. Now, this looks as though 
 I were agreeing with you quite, but I still don't. 
 You put it so extremely. It is so horrid to think 
 that even my emotions may be second-rate. I 
 long ago became aware that my manners were so, 
 but I did like to believe there was nothing second- 
 rate about my soul. Well, what is one to do ? 
 Never be soft ? Never be sad ^ Or sorry ? Or 
 repentant ^ Always stay up at the level of 
 Milton's Time poem, or of his y// a Sokfnn Mustek j 
 strung high up to an unchanging pitch of frigid 
 splendour and nobleness ? It is what I try to aim 
 at. It is what I would best like. Then comes 
 our friend of the red tie, and in the cool of the 
 day, when the world is dim and scented, shakes a 
 little fugue of Bach's out of his fiddle, a sparkling, 
 sly little fugue, frolicsome for all its minor key, a 
 handful of bright threads woven together, twisted 
 in and out, playing, it would seem, at some game
 
 1 66 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 of hide-and-seek, of pretending to want to catch 
 each other into a tangle, but always gaily coming 
 out of the knots, each distinct and holding on its 
 shining way till the meeting at the end, the final 
 embrace when the game is over and they tie 
 themselves contentedly together into one comfort- 
 able major chord, — our friend plays this, this 
 manifestly happy thing, and my soul listens, and 
 smiles, and sighs, and longs, and ends by being 
 steeped in Wehmuth. I choose the little fugue of 
 Bach as an instance, for of all music it is aimed 
 most distinctly at the intellect, it is the furthest 
 removed from Wehmuth ; and if it has this effect 
 on me I will not make you uncomfortable by a 
 description of what the baser musics do, the 
 musics of passion, of furious exultations and 
 furious despairs. But my vague wish for I do 
 not know what, gentle, and rather sweetly resigned 
 when the accompaniment is Bach, swells suddenly 
 while I listen to them into a terrifying longing 
 that rends and shatters my soul. 
 
 "What private things I tell you. I wouldn't 
 if I were talking. I would be affected by your 
 actual presence. But writing is so different and 
 so strange ; at once so much more and so much 
 less intimate. The body is safe — far away, un- 
 assailable ; and the spirit lets itself go out to meet 
 a fellow spirit with the frankness it can never 
 show when the body goes too, that grievous 
 hinderer of the communion of saints, that officious 
 blunderer who can spoil the serencst intercourse 
 by a single blush.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 167 
 
 Johanna came in just there. She was decked 
 in smiles, and wanted to say good-bye till to- 
 morrow morning. It is her night out, and she 
 really looked rather wonderful to one used to her 
 kitchen condition. Her skin, cleansed from 
 week-day soilure, was surprisingly fair ; her hair, 
 waved more beautifully than mine will ever be, 
 was piled up in bright imposing masses ; her 
 starched white dress had pink ribbons about it ; 
 she wore cotton gloves ; and held the handker- 
 chief I lend her on these occasions genteelly by 
 its middle in her hand. Every second Sunday 
 she descends the mountain at sunset, the door- 
 key in her pocket, and dances all night in some 
 convivial Gasthofm the town, coming up again at 
 sunrise or later, according to the amount of fun 
 she was having. On the Monday I do nearly 
 everything alone, for she sleeps half the day, and 
 the other half she doesn't like being talked to. 
 She is a good servant, and she would certainly go 
 if we tried to get her in again under the twelve 
 hours. On the alternate Sundays we allow her 
 to have her young man up fOr the afternoon and 
 evening. He is a trumpeter in the regiment 
 stationed in Jena, and he brings his trumpet to 
 fill up awkward silences. Engaged couples of 
 that kind don't seem able to talk much, so that 
 the trumpet is a great comfort to them. When- 
 ever conversation flags he whips it out and blows 
 a rousing blast, giving her time to think of some- 
 thing to say next. I had to ask him to do it in 
 the garden, for the first time it nearly blew our
 
 1 68 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 roof, which isn't very tightly on, off. Now he 
 and she sit together on a bench outside the door, 
 and the genius down the hill with the exclusive 
 ears suffers, I am afraid, rather acutely. Papa 
 and 1 wander as far away as we can get among 
 the mountains. 
 
 It is rather dreadful when they quarrel. Then, 
 of course, Johanna sulks as girls will, and sulks 
 are silent things, so that the trumpet has to fill 
 up a yawning gulf and never leaves off at all. 
 Last Sunday it blew the whole time we were out, 
 and I expected when I got home to find the 
 engagement broken off. We stayed away as long 
 as we could, climbing higher and higher, wander- 
 ing further and further, supping at last reluctantly 
 on cucumber salad and cold herrings in the little 
 restaurant up on the Schweizerhohe because the 
 trumpet wouldn't stop and we didn't dare go 
 home till it did. Its blast pursued us even into 
 the recesses of the dingy wooden hall we took 
 our ears into, vainly trying to carry them some- 
 where out of range. It seemed to be a serious 
 quarrel. We had a depressing meal. We both 
 esteem Johanna with the craven esteem you feel 
 for a person, at any moment capable of giving 
 notice, who does all the unpleasant things you 
 would otherwise have to do yourself. The state 
 of her temper seriously affects our peace. You 
 see, the house is small, and if her trumpeter has 
 been unsatisfactory and she throws the saucepans 
 about or knocks the broom in sweeping against all 
 the wooden things like doors and skirting-boards,
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 169 
 
 it makes an unendurable clatter and puts an 
 end at once to Papa's work and to my equally- 
 earnest play. If, her nerves being already on 
 edge, I were to suggest to her even smilingly to 
 be quiet, she would at once give notice — I know 
 she would — and the dreary search begin again for 
 that impossible treasure you in England call a 
 paragon and we in Jena call a pearl. Where am I 
 to find a clean, honest, strong pearl, able to cook 
 and willing to come and live in what is something 
 like an unopened oyster-shell, so shut-up, so cut- 
 off, so solitary would her existence here be, for 
 eight pounds a year ? It is easy for you august 
 persons who never see your servants, who have 
 so many that by sheer force of numbers they 
 become unnoticeable, to deride us who have only 
 one for being so greatly at her mercy. I know 
 you will deride. I see your letter already : " Dear 
 Frilulein Schmidt, Is not your attitude towards 
 the maid Johanna unworthy ? " It isn't un- 
 worthy, because it is natural. Defiantly I confess 
 that it is also cringing. Well, it is natural to 
 cringe under the circumstances. So would you. 
 I dare say if your personal servant is a good one, 
 and you depend much on him for comfort, you 
 do do it as it is. And there arc very few girls 
 in Jena who would come out of it and take a 
 situation on the side of a precipice for eight 
 pounds a year. Really the wages are small, 
 balanced against the disadvantages. And wages 
 arc going up. Down in Jena a good servant can 
 get ten pounds a year now without much difficulty.
 
 170 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 So that it behoves us who cannot pay such prices 
 to humour Johanna. 
 
 About nine the trumpet became suddenly 
 dumb. Papa and I, after waiting a few minutes, 
 set out for home, conjecturing as we went in 
 what state we should find Johanna. Did the 
 silence mean a rupture or a making-up .'' I 
 inclined towards the rupture, for how can a girl, 
 I asked Papa, murmur mild words of making-up 
 to a lover engaged in blowing a trumpet .? Papa 
 said he didn't know ; and engrossed by fears we 
 walked home without speaking. 
 
 No one was to be seen. The house was dark 
 and empty. Everything was quiet except the 
 crickets. The trumpeter had gone, but so, 
 apparently, had Johanna. She had forgotten to 
 lock the door, so that all we — or anybody else 
 passing that way — had to do was to walk in. 
 Nobody, however — and by nobody I mean the 
 criminally intentioned, briefly burglars — walks 
 into houses perched as ours is. They would be 
 very breathless burglars by the time they got to 
 our garden gate. We should hear their stertorous 
 breathing as they laboured up well in time to 
 lock the door ; and Papa, ever pitiful and polite, 
 would as likely as not unlock it again to hasten 
 out and offer them chairs and lemonade. It was 
 not, then, with any misgivings of that sort that 
 we went into our deserted house and felt about 
 for matches ; but I was surprised that Johanna, 
 when she could sit comfortably level on the seat 
 by the door, should rather choose to go and stroll
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 171 
 
 m the garden. You cannot stroll in my garden. 
 You can do very few of the things in it that most 
 people can do in most gardens, and certainly 
 strolling is not one of them. It is no place for 
 lovers, or philosophers, or leisurely persons of 
 the sort. It is an unrestful place, in which you 
 are forced to be energetic, to watch where you put 
 your feet, to balance yourself to a nicety, to be 
 continually on the alert. I lit a lantern, and 
 went out in search of Johanna strolling. I stood 
 on the back door steps and looked right and 
 looked left. No Johanna. No sounds of Johanna. 
 Only the crickets, and the soft darting by of a 
 bat. I went down the steps — they are six irregular 
 stones embedded one beneath the other in the 
 clay and leading to the pump from which, in 
 buckets, we supply our need for water — and 
 standing still again, again heard only crickets. 1 
 went to the mignonette beds I have made — 
 mignonette and nasturtiums ; mignonette for 
 scent and nasturtiums for beauty, and I hope you 
 like nasturtiums — and standing still again, again 
 heard only crickets. The night was dark and 
 soft, and seemed of a limitless vastncss. The 
 near shrill of the crickets made the silence 
 beyond more intense. A cat prowled past, velvet- 
 footed, silent as the night, a vanishing grey streak, 
 intent and terrible, concentrated wholly on prey. 
 I went on through the grass, my shoes wet with 
 dew, the lantern light fitfully calHng out my 
 possessions from the blackness — the three apple- 
 trees, the currant-bush, the pale group of starworts,
 
 172 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 children of some accidental wind-dropped seed of 
 long ago ; and beside the starworts I stopped 
 again and listened. Still only the crickets ; and 
 presently very far away the whistle of the night 
 express from Berlin to Munich as it hurried past 
 the little station in the Paradies valley. It was 
 extraordinarily quiet. Once I thought my own 
 heart-beats were the footsteps of a late wanderer 
 on the road. I went further, down to the very 
 end, to the place where my beautiful, untiring 
 monthly-rose bush unfolds pink flower after pink 
 flower against the fence that separates us from 
 our neighbour's kingdom, and stopped again and 
 listened. At first still only crickets, and the 
 anxious twitter of a bird towards whose nest that 
 stealthy, murderous streak of grey was drawing. 
 It began to rain ; soft, warm drops from the 
 motionless clouds spread low across the sky. I 
 forgot Johanna, and became wholly possessed by 
 the brooding spirit of the night, by the feeling of 
 oneness, of identity with the darkness, the silence, 
 the scent. My feet were wet with dew ; my hair 
 with the warm and gentle rain. I lifted up my 
 face and let the drops fall on it through the leaves 
 of the apple-trees, warm and gentle as a caress. 
 Then the sudden blare of a trumpet made me 
 start and quiver. I quivered so much that the 
 lantern fell down and went out. The blare was 
 the loudest noise I thought I had ever heard, 
 ripping up the silence like a jagged knife. The 
 startled hills couldn't get over it, but went on 
 echoing and re-echoing it, tossing it backwards
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 173 
 
 and forwards to each other in an endless surprise, 
 and had hardly settled down again with a kind of 
 shudder when they were roused to frenzy by 
 another. After that there was blare upon blare. 
 The man only stopped to take breath. They 
 were louder, more rollicking than any 1 had 
 heard him produce. And they came from the 
 neighbour's house, from the very dwelling of him 
 of the easily tortured ears, of him for whom 
 Wagner is not good enough. Well, do you 
 know what he had done .'' I ran down to question, 
 and to extract Johanna and explain the trumpeter, 
 and I met the poor genius, very pale and damp- 
 looking, his necktie struggled up behind to the 
 top of his collar, its bow twisted round somehow 
 under his left ear. He was hurrying out into 
 the night as I arrived, panting, on the doorstep. 
 
 " Why in the world " I began ; but a blast 
 
 drowned further speech. 
 
 He flung up his hands, and the darkness 
 engulfed him. 
 
 " It's raining," I tried to cry after his hatlcss 
 figure. 
 
 1 thought I heard him call back something 
 about Pilsner — " It's the Pilsner," I thought I 
 heard him say ; but the noise coming from the 
 kitchen was too violent for me to be sure. 
 
 His father was in the passage, walking up and 
 down it, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders 
 up to his ears as though he were shrinking from 
 blows. He told me what his unhappy son had 
 done. Not able to endure the trum]ict when it
 
 174 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 was being blown up at our house earlier in the 
 evening, not able to endure it even softened, 
 chastened, subdued by distance and the inter- 
 vening walls, he had directed his mother to go 
 up and invite the player down to her kitchen, 
 where he was to be cajoled into eating and drink- 
 ing, because, as the son explained, full of glee at 
 his sagacity, no man who is eating and drinking 
 can at the same time be blowing a trumpet. 
 
 "Thus," said his father, in jerks coincident 
 with the breath-takings of the trumpeter, " did he 
 hope to obtain peace." 
 
 " But he didn't," said I. 
 
 " No. For a period there was extreme, 
 delicious quiet. Mother " — so he invariably 
 describes his wife — " sacrificed her best sausage, 
 for how shall we permit our son to be tortured ? 
 The bread was spread with butter three centi- 
 meters deep. The trumpeter and his Schatz sat 
 quietly in the kitchen eating it. We sat quietly 
 on the verandah discussing great themes. Then 
 that good beer my son so often praises, that 
 excellent, barrel-kept, cellar-lodged Pilsner beer, 
 bright as amber, clear as ice, cool as — cool 
 as 
 
 "A cucumber," I assisted. 
 
 " Good. Very good. As a cucumber — as a 
 salad of cucumbers." 
 
 " No, no — there's pepper in a salad. You'd 
 better just keep to plain cucumber," I interrupted, 
 always rather nice in the matter of images. 
 
 " Cool, then, as plain cucumber — this usually
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 17s 
 
 admirable stuff instead of, as we had expected, 
 sending him gradually and pleasantly to sleep — 
 I mean, of course, making him gradually and 
 pleasantly so sleepy that thoughts of his bed, 
 growing in affection with every glass, would cause 
 him to arise and depart to his barracks — woke 
 him up. And, my dear Fraulein, you yourself 
 heard — you are hearing now — how completely it 
 did it." 
 
 " Is he — is he ? " I inquired nervously. 
 
 The neighbour nodded. " He is," he said ; 
 " he has consumed fourteen glasses." 
 
 And indeed he was ; and I should say from 
 the tumult, from the formlessness of it, the 
 tunelessness, the rollicksomeness, that never was 
 anybody more so. 
 
 " I fear my son will leave us for some quieter 
 spot before his holiday is over," said the neigh- 
 bour, looking distressed. 
 
 And perhaps it will convince you more than 
 anything else I have said of the extreme value of 
 our Johannas, when I tell you that, goaded by 
 the noise and by his disappointed face to rash 
 promises, I declared I would dismiss the girl 
 unless she broke off such an engagement, and he 
 stared at me for a moment in astonishment, and 
 then resignedly shook his head and said, with the 
 weary conviction of a householder of thirty years' 
 standing, " Das geht dock nicht.'' 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rosii-MARiE Schmidt.
 
 XLIIl 
 
 Galgenberg, Sept. 9. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — But it is true. Our 
 
 servants do not get more than from one hundred 
 
 to two hundred and fifty marks a year, and indeed 
 
 I think it is a great deal, and cannot see why, 
 
 because you spend as much (you say you do, so 
 
 I must believe it) in a month on gloves and ties, 
 
 it should make you hate yourself. Do not hate 
 
 yourself. Your doing so doesn't make us pay 
 
 our servants more. Why, how do you suppose 
 
 we could get all we need out of our hundred 
 
 pounds a year — I translate our marks into your 
 
 pounds for your greater convenience — if we had 
 
 to give a servant more than eight of them and 
 
 for our house more than fifteen ? Papa and I 
 
 do not like to be kept hungry in the matter of 
 
 books, and we shall probably spend every penny 
 
 of our income ; but I know a number of families 
 
 with children who live decently and have occasional 
 
 coffee-parties, and put by for their daughters' 
 
 trousseaux on the same sum. As for the servants 
 
 themselves, have I not described Johanna's 
 
 splendid appearance on her Sundays, her white 
 
 dress and gloves, and the pink ribbons round 
 
 176
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 177 
 
 her waist ? She finds her wages will buy these 
 things and still leave enough for the savings- 
 bank. She is quite content. Only I don't know 
 if she would remain so if you were to come and 
 lament over her and tell her what a little way 
 you make the same money go. You see, she 
 would probably not grasp the true significance of 
 the admission, which is, I take it, not that she 
 has too little, but that you spend too much. Yet 
 how can I from my Galgenberg judge what is 
 necessary in gloves and ties for a splendid young 
 man like yourself.'' The sum seems to me terrific. 
 There must be stacks of gloves and ties constantly 
 growing higher about your path. You, then, 
 spend on these two things alone almost exactly 
 what we three spend in a year on everything. 
 But my astonishment is only the measure of my 
 ignorance. Do not hate yourself. Either spend 
 the money without compunction, or, if you have 
 compunction, don't spend it. A sinner should 
 always, I think, sin gaily or not at all. I don't 
 mean that you in this are a sinner ; I only mean 
 that as a general principle half-hearted sinners are 
 contemptible, it is a poor creature who while 
 he sins is sorry. If he must sin, let him at least 
 do it with all his heart, and having done it waste 
 no time in whimpers, but try to turn his back on 
 it and his face towards the good. Please do not 
 hate yourself. I am sure you have to have the 
 things. Your letter is more than usually depressed. 
 Please do not hate yourself. It does no good 
 and lowers your vitality. It is as bad as sorrow, 
 
 N
 
 178 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 which surely is very bad. I think nothing great 
 was done by any one who wasted time peering 
 about among his faults ; but if ever you meet 
 the pastor who prepared me for confirmation, 
 don't tell him I said so. I don't know how it 
 is with yours in England, but here the pastors 
 seem altogether unable to bear listening to 
 descriptions of plain facts. When they come to 
 doctor my soul, why may I not tell them its 
 symptoms as baldly as I tell my body's symptoms 
 to the physician who would heal it ? He is not 
 shocked or angry when I show him my sore 
 places ; he recommends a plaster or a dose, 
 encourages, and goes away. But your spiritual 
 doctor takes your spiritual sore places as a kind 
 of personal affront ; at least, his manner often 
 shows indignation in proportion as you are frank. 
 Instead of being patient, he hardly lets you 
 speak ; instead of prescribing, he denounces ; 
 instead of helping, he passionately scolds ; and 
 so you do not go to him again, but fight through 
 your later miseries alone. Just at the time of 
 my preparation for confirmation my mother died. 
 My heart, blank with sorrow, was very fit for 
 religious impressions and consolations. The pre- 
 paration lasts two years, and three times every 
 week during that time I went to classes. For 
 two years 1 was not allowed to dance or to go 
 to even the mildest parties. For two years, 
 from sixteen to eighteen, I was earnest, prayerful, 
 humbly seeking ^.fter righteousness. Then one 
 day, when questionings had come upon me that
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 179 
 
 my conscience could not approve, I went to the 
 pastor who had prepared me as confidently as 
 I would go with a toothache to a dentist, and 
 bared my sensitive conscience to him, and begged 
 to have my thoughts arranged and my doubts 
 and questionings settled. To my amazement 
 and extreme fright I beheld him shoclced, angry, 
 hardly able to endure hearing me tell all 1 had 
 been wondering. It seemed very strange. 1 
 sat at last with downcast eyes, silent, ashamed, 
 my heart shrunk back into reserve and frost. I 
 was not being helped ; I was being scolded, and 
 bitterly scolded. At last at the door some special 
 word of blame stung me to heat, and I cried, 
 " Herr Pastor, when my tongue is bad and I 
 show it to a doctor, he gives me a pill. Are 
 you not the doctor of my spirit ? Why, then, 
 when I come to you to be healed, do you, instead 
 of giving me medicine, so cruelly rate me ? " 
 
 And he, staring at me a moment aghast, struck 
 his hands together above his head. " Thy father ! " 
 he cried, " Thy father ! It is he who speaks — it 
 is he speaking in thee. Such words come not 
 unaided from the mouth of eighteen, from the 
 mouth of one confirmed by these very hands. 
 y/c/ij miserable maiden, it is not with such as thee 
 that Paradise is peopled. The taint of thy parent- 
 age is heavy upon thee. Thou art not, thou canst 
 not be, thou hast never been a child of God." 
 
 And that was all I got for my pains. 
 
 Tell me, what mood were you in when you 
 wrote ? Was it not, apart from its dejection, one
 
 i8o FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 rather inclined to peevishness ? You ask, for 
 instance, why I write so much about a tipsy trum- 
 peter when 1 know you are anxious to hear about 
 the other things 1 never tell you. I can't imagine 
 what they are. You must let me write how and 
 what I like — bear with me while I discourse of 
 roses and nasturtium-beds, of rain and sunshine, 
 clouds and wind, cats, birds, servants, even trum- 
 peters. My life holds nothing greater than these. 
 If you want to hear from me you must hear also 
 of them. And why have you taken so bitter a 
 dislike to our gifted young neighbour down the 
 hill, calling him contemptuously a fiddler ? He is 
 certainly a fiddler, if to fiddle in one's hours of 
 ease produces one, and perhaps you would be 
 twice as happy as you are if you could fiddle half 
 so wonderfully as he does. He is gone. His 
 holiday either came to an end or was put to an 
 end by Johanna's fiance. Now, in these early 
 September days, this season of mists and mellow 
 fruitfulness, of cloudy mornings and calm evenings 
 and golden afternoons, he has turned his back on 
 the hills and forests, on the reddening creepers and 
 sweetening grapes, on the splash of water among 
 ferns and rocks, on all those fresh, quiet things 
 that make life worth having, and is sitting at a 
 desk somewhere in Berlin doggedly bent on be- 
 coming, by means of a great outlay of days and 
 years, a Landrath^ a Regierungsrath^ a Geheimrath, 
 and a Wirklicher Geheimrath mit dem Pradikat 
 Excellenz. When he has done that he will take 
 down his hat and go forth at last to enjoy life,
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER i8i 
 
 and will find to his surprise that it isn't there, 
 that it is all behind him, a heap of dusty days 
 piled in the corners of offices, and that his knees 
 shake as he goes about looking for it, and that he 
 can no longer even tune his fiddle by himself but 
 has to have it done for him by the footman. 
 
 Isn't that what happens to all you wise men, 
 so prudently determined to make your way in the 
 world ? You must be very sure of another life, or 
 how could you bear to squander this ? The things 
 you are missing — oh, the things you are missing ! 
 while you so carefully add little gain to little gain, 
 or what I would rather call little loss to little loss. 
 I see no point in slaving day after day through 
 one's best years. Suppose you do not, in the end, 
 have a footman to open your door — the footman 
 is merely a symbol, conveniently expressing the 
 multitude of superfluities that gather about the 
 declining years of the person who has got on, 
 things bought with the sacrifice of his life, and 
 none of them giving him back the lost power, 
 gone with youth, to enjoy them — suppose, then, 
 you do not end gloriously with a footman, what 
 of that .'' 1 must be blind, for 1 never can see the 
 desirability of these trappings. Yet they surely 
 arc of an immense desirability, since everybody, 
 really everybody, is willing to give so much in pay- 
 ment for them. Our elder neighbour down the 
 hill has actually given his eyes and his back ; he 
 peers at life through spectacles, and walks about 
 like Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, bent double 
 through poking about for years in the muddy
 
 i82 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 pools of little boys' badly written exercises ; and 
 here he is at fifty still not satisfied with what he 
 has earned, still going on drudging the whole year 
 round, except for his six short weeks in summer. 
 His wife is thrifty ; they have only the one son ; 
 they live frugally ; long ago they must have put 
 by enough to keep them warm and fed and clothed 
 without his doing another stroke of work. 
 
 I was interrupted there by a message from him 
 asking if I would come down and help him gather 
 up the windfalls in his orchard, his wife being busy 
 pickling beans. I went, my head full of what I had 
 just been writing to you, and I gathered up together 
 with the apples a little lesson in the foolishness of 
 officious and hasty criticism. It was this way. 
 
 Our baskets being full, and our backs rested, 
 he groaned and said that in another week he must 
 leave for Weimar. 
 
 "But you like your work," said I. 
 
 " I detest my work," he said peevishly. " I 
 detest teaching. I detest little boys." 
 
 " Then why " I began, but stopped. 
 
 " Why } Why ? Because I detest it is no 
 reason I should not do it." 
 
 " Yes, it is." 
 
 "What, and at my age begin another? " 
 
 " No, no." 
 
 " You would not have me idle ? " 
 
 "Yes, I would." 
 
 He stared at me gravely through his spectacles. 
 " This is unprincipled," he said. 
 
 1 laughed. It is years since I have observed
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 183 
 
 that the principled groan a good deal and make 
 discontented criticisms of life, and I don't think I 
 care to be one of them. 
 
 " It is," he persisted, seeing that I only laughed. 
 
 « Is it .? " said I. 
 
 " It is man's lot to work," said he. 
 
 *'Is it.?" said I. 
 
 " Certainly," said he. 
 
 "All day?" 
 
 "If he cannot get it done in less time, 
 certainly." 
 
 "Every day? " 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 " All through the years of his life ? " 
 
 " All through the years of his strength, 
 certainly." 
 
 "What for?" 
 
 " My dear young lady, have you been living 
 again on vegetables lately ? " 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Your words sound as though your thoughts 
 were watery." 
 
 A nettled silence fell upon me, and while I was 
 arranging how best to convince him of their sub- 
 stance he was shaking his head and saying that it 
 was strange how the most intelligent women are 
 unable really to think. " Water," he continued, 
 "is indispensable in its proper place and good in 
 many others where, strictly, it might be done 
 without. I have nothing to say against watery 
 emotions, watery sentiments, even watery affec- 
 tions, especially in ladies, who would be less
 
 184 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 charming in proportion as they were more rigid. 
 Ebb and flow, uncertainty, instability, unaccount- 
 ableness, are becoming to your sex. But in the 
 region of thought, of the intellect, of pure reason, 
 everything should be very dry. The one place, 
 my dear young lady, in which I will endure no 
 water is on the brain. 
 
 I had no answer ready. There seemed to be 
 nothing left to do but to go home. I did go a 
 few steps up the orchard, reflecting on the way 
 men have of telling you you cannot think, or are 
 not logical, at the very moment when you appear 
 to yourself to be most unanswerable — a regret- 
 table habit that at once puts a stop to interesting 
 conversation — and presently, as I was nearing 
 our fence, he called after me. " Friiulein Rose- 
 Marie," he called pleasantly. 
 
 " Well ? " said I, looking down at him over 
 a displeased shoulder. 
 
 " Come back." 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Come back and dine with us." 
 
 " No." 
 
 " There is mutton for dinner, and before that 
 a soup full of the concentrated strength of beasts. 
 Up there I know you will eat carrots and stewed 
 apples, and I shall never be able to make you see 
 what I see." 
 
 " Heaven forbid that I ever should." 
 
 " What, you do not desire to be reasonable ? " 
 
 " I don't choose to argue with you." 
 
 " Have I done aiiything ? "
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 1S5 
 
 " You are not logical enough for me," said I, 
 anxious to be beforehand with the inevitable 
 remark. 
 
 " Come, come," said he, his face crinkling 
 into smiles. 
 
 "It's true," said I. 
 
 " Come back and prove it." 
 
 " Useless." 
 
 " You cannot." 
 
 " I will not." 
 
 " It is the same thing." 
 
 I went on up the hill. 
 
 " Fraulein Rose-Marie 1 " 
 
 « Well ? " 
 
 "Come back." 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Come back, and tell me why you think I 
 ought to give up my work and sit for the rest of 
 my days with hanging hands." 
 
 I turned and looked down at him. " Because," 
 I said, "are you not fifty ? And is not that high 
 time to begin and get something out of life .'* " 
 
 He adjusted his spectacles, and stared up at 
 mc attentively. "Continue," he said. 
 
 " I look at your life, at all those fifty years of 
 it, and I see it insufferably monotonous." 
 
 " Continue." 
 
 "Dull." 
 
 " Continue." 
 
 «' Dusty." 
 
 " Continue." 
 )rcary." 
 
 «Di
 
 1 86 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Continue." He nodded his head gently at 
 each adjective and counted them off on his 
 fingers. 
 
 " I see it full of ink-spots, dog-eared gram- 
 mars, and little boys." 
 
 " Continue." 
 
 " It is a constant going over the same ground 
 — in itself a maddening process. No sooner do 
 the boys reach a certain age and proficiency 
 and become slightly more interesting than they 
 go on to somebody else, and you begin again at 
 the beginning with another batch. You teach in 
 a bare-walled room with enormous glaring win- 
 dows, and the ring of the electric tram-bell in the 
 street below makes the commas in your sentences. 
 You have been doing this every day for thirty 
 years. The boys you taught at first are fathers 
 of families now. The trees in the playground 
 have grown from striplings into big shady things. 
 Everything has gone on, and so have you — but 
 you have only gone on getting drier and more 
 bored." 
 
 " Continue," said he, smiling. 
 
 " Your intelligence," said I, coming down a 
 little nearer, " restless at first, and for ever trying 
 to push green shoots through the thick rind of 
 routine " 
 
 " Good. Quite good. Continue." 
 
 " — through to a wider space, a more generous 
 light '' 
 
 " Poetic. Quite poetic. My compliments." 
 
 " Thank you. Your intelligence, then, for
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 187 
 
 ever — for ever — you've interrupted me, and I 
 don't know where I'd got to." 
 
 " You had got to my intelligence having 
 green shoots." 
 
 " Oh yes. Well, they're not green now. 
 That's the point I've been stumbling towards. 
 They ought to be if you had taken bigger hand- 
 fuls of leisure and had not wholly wasted your 
 time drudging. But now they ought to be more 
 than shoots — great trees, in whose shade we all 
 would sit gratefully, and you enjoying free days, 
 with the pleasant memory of free years behind 
 you and the cheerful hope of roomy years to 
 come. And during all that time of your im- 
 prisonment in a classroom the world outside 
 went on its splendid way, the seasons filled it 
 with beauty which you were not there to see, the 
 sun shone and warmed other people, the winds 
 blew and made other people's flesh tingle and 
 their blood dance — you, of course, were cramped 
 up with cold feet and a headache — the birds sang 
 to other people tunes of heaven, while in your 
 ears buzzed only the false quantities of reluctant 
 little boys, the delicious rain " 
 
 " Stop, stop. You forget I had to earn a 
 iving. 
 
 " Of course you had. But you know you 
 earned your living long ago. What you arc 
 earning now is much more like your dying — the 
 dying, the atrophy of your soul. What docs it 
 matter if your wife has one bonnet less a year, 
 and no silk dress "
 
 1 88 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 *' Do not let her hear you," he said, glancing 
 round. 
 
 " — or if you keep no servant, and have less 
 to eat on Sundays than your neighbours, give no 
 parties, and don't cumber yourselves up with 
 acquaintances who care nothing for you ? If you 
 gave up these things you could also give up 
 drudging. You are too old to drudge. You 
 have been too old these twenty years. A man of 
 your brains " — he pretended to look grateful — 
 " who cannot earn enough between twenty and 
 thirty to keep him from the necessity of slaving 
 for the rest of his days is not — is not " 
 
 " Worthy of the name of man ? " 
 
 ** I don't know that that's a great thing," said 
 I doubtfully. 
 
 "Let it pass. It is an accepted ending to 
 a sentence beginning as yours did. And now, 
 my dear young lady, you have preached me a 
 
 sermon " 
 
 " Not a sermon," 
 
 " Permitted me, then, to be present at a 
 lecture " 
 
 " Not a lecture." 
 
 "Anyhow, held forth on the unworthily puny 
 outer conditions of my existence. Tell me, now, 
 one thing. I concede the ink-spots, the little 
 boys, the monotony, the tram-bells, the regret- 
 table number of years ; they are all there, and 
 you with your vivid imagination see them all. 
 But tell me one thing : has it never occurred to 
 you that they are the merest shell, the merest
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 189 
 
 husk and envelopment, and that it is possible 
 that, in spite of them " — his voice grew serious 
 — "my life may be very rich within ? " 
 
 And you, my friend, tell me another thing. 
 Am I not desperately, hopelessly horrid ? Short- 
 sighted ? Impertinent ? The readiest jumper at 
 conclusions ? The most arrogant critic of other 
 people? Rich within. Of course. Hidden with 
 God. That is what 1 have never seen when I 
 have looked on superciliously from the height of 
 my own idleness at these drudging lives. And 
 see how amazing has been my foolishness, for 
 would not my own life judged from outside, this 
 life here alone with Papa, this restricted, poor, 
 solitary life, my first youth gone, my future with- 
 out prospects, no distractions, few friends, Papa's 
 affection growing vaguer as he grows older, — would 
 it not, looked at as 1 have been looking at my 
 neighbour's, seem entirely blank and desolate ? 
 Yet how sincerely can I echo what he said — My 
 life is very rich within. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XLIV 
 
 Galgcnbcrg, Sept. 16. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — It is kind of you to 
 want to contradict what I said in my last letter 
 about the outward appearance of my life, but 
 really you know I am past my first youth. At 
 twenty-six I cannot pretend to be what is known 
 as a young girl, and I don't want to. Not for 
 anything would I be seventeen or eighteen again. 
 I like to be a woman grown, to have entered into 
 the full possession of whatever faculties I am to 
 have, to know what I want, to look at things 
 in their true proportions. I don't know that 
 eighteen has anything that compensates for that. 
 It is such a rudderless sort of age. It may be 
 more charming to the beholder, but it is not half 
 so nice to the person herself. What is the good 
 of loving chocolate to distraction when it only 
 ends by making you sick ? And the joy of a 
 new frock or hat is dashed at once when you 
 meet the superior gorgeousncss of some other 
 girl's frock or hat. And parties are often dis- 
 appointing things. And students, though they 
 are deeply interesting, easily lead to tiresome 
 
 complications if they admire you, and if they 
 
 190
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 191 
 
 don't that isn't very nice either. Why, even the 
 young man in the cake-shop who used so gallantly 
 to serve us with lemonade and had such wonderful 
 curly eyelashes was not much good really, for he 
 couldn't be invited to tea, and whenever we 
 wanted to look, at his eyelashes we had to buy a 
 cake, and cakes are dreadfully expensive for per- 
 sons who have no money. Yes, it is a silly, 
 tittering, calf-like age, and I am glad it can't come 
 back ao-ain. Please do not think that I need 
 comforting because it is gone, or because of any 
 of the other items in the list I gave you. The 
 future looks quite pleasant to me — quite bright 
 and sunny. It is only empty of what people call 
 prospects, by which I take them to mean hus- 
 bands, but I shall fill it with pigs instead. I have 
 great plans. I see what can be done with even 
 one pig from my neighbour's example, who has 
 dug out a sort of terrace and put a sty on it : 
 simply wonders. And how much more could be 
 done with two. I mean to be a very happy old 
 maid. I shall fix my attention in the mornings 
 on remunerative objects like pigs, and spend 
 beautiful afternoons, quite idle physically but with 
 my soul busy up among the poets. Later on in 
 distant years, when Papa doesn't want me any 
 more, I shall try to find a little house somewhere 
 where it is flat, so that I can have other creatures 
 about me besides bees, which arc the only live 
 stock I can keep here. And you mustn't think I 
 shall not be happy, because 1 shall. So happy. I 
 am happy now, and I mean to be happy then ;
 
 192 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 and when I am very old and have to die I shall 
 be happy about that too. I shall " lay me down 
 with a will," as the bravest of your countrymen 
 sang. 
 
 Do my plans seem to you selfish ? I expect 
 they do. People so easily call those selfish who 
 stand a little aside and look on at life. We have J^ 
 poet of whom we are proud, but whose fame 
 has not, I think, reached across to England, a 
 rugged, robust poet, not very far below Goethe, 
 a painter on large canvases, best at mighty 
 scenes, perhaps least good in small things, in 
 lyrics, in the things in which Heine was so 
 exquisite ; and he for my encouragement has 
 said — 
 
 Bel sich selber f angt man an, 
 Da man nicht Allen helfen kann. 
 
 Isn't it a nice jingle ? The man's name is 
 Hebbel, and he lived round about the forties, and 
 perhaps you know more of him than I do, and I 
 have been arrogant again ; but it is a jingle that 
 has often cheered me when I was afraid I ought 
 to be teaching somebody something, or making 
 clothes for somebody, or paying somebody domi- 
 ciliary visits and tallcing fluently of the lieher Gott. 
 I shrink from these things ; and a shrinking 
 visitor, shy and uncertain, cannot be so nice as no 
 visitor at all. Is it very wrong of me ? When 
 my conscience says^it is — it does not say so often 
 — I try to make up by going into the kitchen and 
 asking Johanna kind questions about her mother. 
 I must say she is rather odd when I do. She not
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 193 
 
 only doesn't meet me halfway, she doesn't come 
 even part of the way. She clatters her saucepans 
 with an energy very like fury, and grows wholly 
 monosyllabic. Yet it is not her stepmother ; it 
 is her very own mother, and it ought to be the 
 best way of touching responsive chords in her 
 heart and making her feel I am not merely a 
 mistress but a friend. Once, struck by the way 
 the lids of the saucepans were falling about, I 
 tried her with her father, but the din instantly 
 became so terrific that I was kept silent quite a 
 long time, and when it left off felt instinctively 
 that I had better say something about the weather. 
 I don't think I told you that after that trumpeting 
 Sunday, moved to real compassion by the suffer- 
 ings of him you call the fiddler man, I took my 
 courage in both hands and told Johanna with the 
 pleasantest of smiles — I dare say it was really a 
 rather ghastly one — that her trumpeter must not 
 again bring his instrument with him when he 
 called. "It can so very well stay at home," I 
 explained suavely. 
 
 She immediately said she would leave on the 
 first of October. 
 
 " But, Johanna ! " I cried. 
 
 She repeated the formula. 
 
 "But, Johanna ! How can a clever girl like 
 you be so unreasonable .'' He is to visit you as 
 often as before. All we beg is that it shall be 
 done without music." 
 
 She repeated the formula. 
 
 "But, Johanna!" I expostulated again — 
 
 o
 
 194 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 eloquent exclamation, expressing the most varied 
 sentiments. 
 
 She once again repeated the formula ; and 
 next day I was forced to descend into Jena, 
 shaking an extremely rueful fist at the neighbour's 
 house on the way, and set about searching in the 
 obscurity of a registry office for the pearl we are 
 trying all our lives to find. 
 
 This office consists of two rooms, the first 
 filled with servants looking for mistresses, and 
 the second with mistresses looking for servants. 
 A Fraulein of vague age but determined bearing 
 sits at a desk in the second room, and notes in a 
 ledger the requirements of both parties. They 
 are always the same : the would-be mistress, full 
 of a hopefulness that crops up again and again to 
 the end of her days, causing attributes like fleissig^ 
 treUj ehrlichy amtandig^ arbeitslieb^ kinderlieb^ to be 
 written down together with her demands in cook- 
 ing, starching, and ironing, and often adding the 
 information that though the wages may appear 
 small they are not really so, owing to the un- 
 usually superior quality of the treatment ; and 
 the would-be maid, briefer because without illu- 
 sions, dictates her firm resolve to go nowhere 
 where there is cooking, washing, or a baby. 
 
 " Gott^ diese Madchen^' exclaimed a waiting 
 lady to me as I arrived, hot and ruffled after my 
 long tramp in the sun. I dropped into a chair 
 beside her ; and hot and ruffled as I was, she, 
 who had been sitting there hours, was still more 
 so. In her agitation she had cried out to the
 
 FR:'\ULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 195 
 
 first human being at hand, the Fraulein at the 
 desk having something too distinctly inhuman 
 about her — strange as a result of her long and 
 intimate intercourse with human beings — to be 
 lightly applied to for sympathy. Then, looking 
 at me again, she cried, "Why, it is the good Rose- 
 Marie ! " And I saw she was an old friend of 
 my stepmother's, Frau Meyer, the wife of one of 
 the doctors at the Lunatic Asylum, who used to 
 come in often while you were with us, and when- 
 ever she came in you went out. 
 
 " Not married yet ? " she asked, as we shook 
 hands, smiling as though the joke were good. 
 
 I smiled with an equal conviction of its good- 
 ness, and said I was not. 
 
 " Not even engaged ? " 
 
 " Not even engaged," said I, smiling more 
 broadly, as if infinitely tickled. 
 
 " You must be cjuick," said she. 
 
 I admitted the necessity by a nod. 
 
 " You are twenty-six — I know your age be- 
 cause poor Emilic " — Emilie was my stepmother — 
 " was married ten years, and when she married 
 you were sixteen. Twenty-six is a great age for 
 a girl. When 1 was your age I had already had 
 four children. What do you think of that .'' " 
 
 I didn't know what to think of it, so smiled 
 vaguely, and turning to the waiting machine at 
 the desk began my list. " Hard-working, clean, 
 honest " 
 
 "Yes, yes, if we could but find such treasures," 
 interrupted Frau Meyer, with a reverberating sigh.
 
 196 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Here am I engaged to give the first coffee-party 
 of the season " 
 
 " What, in summer ? " 
 
 " It is not summer in September. If the 
 weather chooses to pretend it is I cannot help it. 
 It is autumn, and I will no longer endure the 
 want of social gatherings. Invariably I find the 
 time between the last Coffee of spring and the first 
 of autumn almost unendurable. What do you 
 do, Rose-Marie, up there on that horrible moun- 
 tain of yours, to pass the time .'' " 
 
 Pass the time ? I who am so much afraid of 
 Time's passing me that I try to catch at him as he 
 goes, pull him baclc, make him creep slowly while 
 I squeeze the full preciousness out of every 
 minute ? I gazed at her abstractedly, haunted by 
 the recollection of flying days, days gone so 
 quickly, vanished before I well knew how happy 
 I was being. " I really couldn't tell you," I 
 said. 
 
 "Hard-working, clean, honest " read 
 
 out the Frilulein, reminding me that I was busy. 
 
 " Moral," I dictated, " able to wash " 
 
 " You will never find one," interrupted Frau 
 Meyer again. "At least, never one who is both 
 moral and able to wash. Two good things don't 
 go together with these girls, I find. The trouble 
 I am in for want of one ! They are as scarce and 
 as expensive as roses in December. Since April 
 I have had three, and all had to leave by the 
 merest accident — nothing at all to do with the 
 place or me ; but the ones in there seem to know
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 197 
 
 there have been three in the tune, and make the 
 most extravagant demands. I have been here the 
 whole morning, and am in despair." 
 
 She stopped to fan herself with her hand- 
 kerchief 
 
 "Able to wash," I resumed, "iron, cook, 
 mend — have you any one suitable, Frilulein ?" 
 
 " Many," was the laconic answer. 
 
 " I'm afraid we cannot give more than a 
 hundred and sixty marks," said I. 
 
 " Pooh," said Frau Meyer ; and there was a 
 pause in the scratching of the pen. 
 
 " But there are no children," I continued. 
 
 The pen went on more glibly. Frau Meyer 
 fanned herself harder. 
 
 "And only two HerrschafUn.'' 
 
 The pen skimmed over the paper. 
 
 "We live up — we live up on the Galgenberg." 
 
 The pen stopped dead. 
 
 " You will never find one who will go up 
 there," cried Frau Meyer, triumphantly. " I need 
 not fear your taking a good one away from me. 
 They will not leave the town." 
 
 The Frilulcin rang a bell and called out a 
 name. " It is another one for you, Frau Doctor," 
 she said ; and a large young lady came in from 
 the other room. "The general servant Frilulcin 
 Ottilie Krummacher — PVau Doctor Meyer," in- 
 troduced the FrUulcin. " 1 think you may suit 
 each other." 
 
 " It is time you showed mc some one who 
 will," groaned Frau Meyer. "Six have I already
 
 198 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 interviewed, and the demands of all are enough 
 to make my mother, who was Frau Gutsbcsitzer 
 Grosskopf of the Grosskopfs of Grosskopfsecke, 
 born Knoblauch, and a lady of the most exact know- 
 ledge in household matters, turn in her grave." 
 
 " Town ? " asked the large girl, quickly, 
 hardly allowing Frau Meyer to get to a full stop, 
 and obviously callous as to the Grosskopfs of 
 Grosskopfsecke. 
 
 " Yes, yes — here, overlooking the market- 
 place and the interesting statue of the electoral 
 founder of the University. No way to go, 
 therefore, to market. Enlivening scenes con- 
 stantly visible from the windows " 
 
 " Which floor .? " 
 
 " Second. Shallow steps, and a nice balus- 
 trade. Really hardly higher than the first floor, 
 or even than an ordinary ground floor, the rooms 
 being very low." 
 
 " Washing .? " 
 
 *' Done out of the house. Except the smallest, 
 fewest trifles such as — such as — ahem. The 
 ironing, dear Fraulein, I will do mostly myself. 
 There are the shirts, you know — husbands are 
 particular " 
 
 " How many ? " 
 
 " How many .? " echoed Frau Meyer. " How 
 many what ^ " 
 
 " Husbands." 
 
 " y^/^d-r, Fraulein," expostulated the secretary. 
 
 " She said husbands," said the large girl. 
 " Shirts, then — how many } It's all the same."
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 199 
 
 " All the same ? " cried Frau Meyer, who 
 adored her husband. 
 
 " In the work it makes." 
 
 " But, dear Friiulein, the shirts are not washed 
 at home." 
 
 " But Ironed." 
 
 " I iron them." 
 
 "And I heat the irons and keep up the fire 
 to heat them with." 
 
 " Yes, yes," cried Frau Meyer, affecting the 
 extreme pleasure of one who has just received an 
 eager assurance, " so you do." 
 
 The large girl stared. " Cooking ? " she 
 inquired, after a slightly stony pause. 
 
 " Most of that I will do myself, also. The 
 Herr is very particular. I shall only need a little 
 — quite a little assistance. And think of all the 
 new and excellent dishes you will learn to make." 
 
 The girl waved this last inducement aside as 
 unworthy of consideration. " Number of persons 
 in the household ? " 
 
 Frau Meyer coughed before she could answer, 
 *' Oh," said she, "oh, well — there is my husband, 
 and naturally myself, and then there are — there arc 
 — are you fond of children .? " she ended hastily. 
 
 The girl fixed her with a suspicious eye. " It 
 depends how many there are," she said cautiously. 
 
 Frau Meyer got up and leaned over the 
 Friiulein at the desk, and whispered into her 
 impassive ear. 
 
 The Friiulein shook her head. " I am afraid 
 it is no use," she said.
 
 200 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Frau Meyer whispered again. The Fraulein 
 looked up, and, fastening her eyes on a point 
 somewhere below the large girl's chin, said, " The 
 wages are good." 
 
 " What are they ? " asked the girl. 
 
 "Considering the treatment you will re- 
 ceive " the girl's eyes again became sus- 
 picious — "they are excellent." 
 
 "Whatare they ?" 
 
 " Everything found, and a hundred and eighty 
 marks a year." 
 
 The girl turned and walked towards the 
 door. 
 
 " Stop ! Stop 1 " cried Frau Meyer desperately. 
 " I cannot see you throw away a good place with 
 so little preliminary reflection. Have you con- 
 sidered that there would be no trudging to market, 
 and consequently you will only require half the 
 boots and stockings and skirts those poor girls 
 have to buy who live up in the villas that look so 
 grand and pretend to give such high wages ? " 
 
 The girl paused. 
 
 "And no steep stairs to climb, laden with 
 heavy baskets ? And hardly any washing— 
 hardly any washing, I tell you ! " she almost 
 shrieked in her anxiety. "And no cooking to 
 speak of? And every Sunday — mind, every 
 Sunday evening free .'' And I never scold, and 
 my husband never scolds, and with a hundred 
 and eighty marks a year there is nothing a clever 
 girl cannot buy. Why, it is an ideal, a delightful 
 place — one at which 1 would jump if I were a
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 201 
 
 girl, and this lady" — indicating me — "would 
 jump, too, would you not, Rose-Marie ? " 
 
 The girl wavered. " How many children are 
 there ? " she asked. 
 
 " Children ? Children ? Angels, you mean. 
 They are perfect angels, so good and well behaved 
 — are they not, Rose-Marie ? Fit to go at once 
 to heaven — unherufen — without a day's more train- 
 ing, so little would they differ in manner when 
 they got there from angels who have been used 
 to it for years. You are fond of children, Fraulein, 
 I am sure. Naturally you are. I see it in your 
 nice face. No nice Fraulein is not. And these, 
 I tell you, are such unusual " 
 
 " How many are there ? " 
 
 " Ach Gotty there are only six, and so small 
 still that they can hardly be counted as six — six 
 of the dearest " 
 
 The girl turned on her heel. " I cannot be 
 fond of six," she said ; and went out with the 
 heavy tread of finality. 
 
 Frau Meyer looked at me. " There now," 
 she said, in tones of real despair. 
 
 " It is very tiresome," said I, sympathizing the 
 more acutely that 1 knew my turn was coming 
 next. 
 
 "Tiresome.? It is terrible. In two days I 
 
 have my Coffee, and no — and no — and no " 
 
 She burst into tears, hiding her face from the 
 dispassionate stare of the Fraulein at the desk in 
 her handkerchief, and trying to conceal her sobs 
 by a ceaseless blowing of her nose.
 
 202 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 "I am so sorry," I murmured, touched by 
 this utter melting. 
 
 An impulse seized me on which I instantly 
 acted. "Take Johanna," I cried. "Take her 
 for that day. She will at least get you over that. 
 She is excellent at a party, and knows all about 
 Coffees. I'll send her down early, and you keep 
 her as late as you like. She would enjoy the 
 outing, and we can manage quite well for one day 
 without her." 
 
 " Is that — is that the Johanna you had In the 
 Rauchgasse ? " 
 
 " Yes — trained by my stepmother — really good 
 in an emergency." 
 
 Frau Meyer flung her arms round my neck. 
 ^^ Ach danke^ danke^ Bu liebes, gutes Kind!'' she 
 cried, embracing me with a warmth that showed 
 me what heaps of people she must have asked to 
 her party. 
 
 And I, after the first flush of doing a good 
 deed was over and cool reflection had resumed its 
 sway, which it did by the time I was toiling up 
 the hill on the way home after having been 
 unanimously rejected as mistress by the assembled 
 maidens, I repented ; for was not Johanna now 
 my only hope? "Frau Meyer," whispered 
 Reflection In my despondent ear, " will engage 
 her to go to her permanently on the ist, and she 
 v/ill go because of the twenty marks more salary. 
 You have been silly. Of course she would have 
 stayed with you with a little persuasion rather 
 than have to look for another place and spend her
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 203 
 
 money at a registry-office. It is not lilcely, how- 
 ever, that she will refuse a situation costing her 
 nothing." 
 
 But see how true it sometimes is that virtue is 
 rewarded. Johanna went down as I had promised, 
 and worked all day for Frau Meyer. She was 
 given a thaler as a present, as much cake and 
 coffee as she could consume, and received the 
 offer of a permanent engagement when she should 
 leave us. This she told me standing by my bed- 
 side late that night, the candle in her hand lighting 
 up her heated, shining face, and hair dishevelled 
 by exertion. "But," said she, "Fraulein Rose- 
 Marie, not for the world would 1 take the place. 
 Such a restless lady, such a nervous gentleman, 
 such numbers of spoilt and sprawling children. 
 If I had not been there to-day and beheld it from 
 the inside I would have engaged myself to go. 
 But after this" — she waved the candle — "never." 
 
 " What are you going to do, then, Johanna? " 
 I asked, thinking wistfully of the four years we 
 had passed together. 
 
 "Stay here," she announced defiantly. 
 
 I put my arms round her neck and kissed her. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 XLV 
 
 Galgenberg, Sept. 23. 
 
 Dear Mr, Anstruther, — To-day I went down 
 to Jena with the girl from next door, who wanted 
 to do such mild shopping as Jena is prepared for, 
 mild shopping suited to mild purses, and there I 
 drifted into the bookshop in the market-place 
 where I so often used to drift, and there I found 
 a book dealing with English poetry from Chaucer 
 onwards, with pictures of the poets who had 
 written it. But before I go on about that — and 
 you'll be surprised at the amount I have to say — 
 I must explain the girl next door. I don't think 
 I ever told you that there is one. The neighbour 
 let his house just before he left, and let it unex- 
 pectedly well, the people taking the upper part of 
 it for a whole year, and this is their daughter. 
 The neighbour went off jubilant to his little inky 
 boys. 
 
 " See," said he, at parting, " my life actu- 
 ally threatens to become rich without as well as 
 within." 
 
 " Don't," I murmured, turning as hot as 
 
 people do when they are reminded of past 
 
 foolishness. 
 
 X04
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 205 
 
 The new neighbours have been here ten days, 
 and I made friends at once with the girl over the 
 fence. She saw me gathering together into one 
 miserable haycock the September grass Johanna 
 and I had been hacking at in turns with a sickle 
 for the last week, and stood watching me with so 
 evident an interest that at last I couldn't help 
 smiling at her. 
 
 " This is our crop for the winter," I said, 
 pointing to the haycock ; I protest I have seen 
 many a mole-hill bigger." 
 
 " It isn't much," said the girl. 
 
 '' No," I agreed, raking busily. 
 
 " Have you a cow ? " she asked. 
 
 "No." 
 
 '' A pig ? " 
 
 '' No." 
 
 " No animals } " 
 
 " Bees." 
 
 The girl was silent ; then she said bees were 
 not animals. 
 
 "But they're live-stock," I said. "They're 
 the one link that connects us with farminof." 
 
 " What do you make hay for, then ? " 
 
 " Only to keep the grass short, and then wc 
 try to imagine it's a lawn." 
 
 Raking, I came a little nearer ; and so I saw 
 she had been, quite recently, crying. 
 
 I looked at her more attentively. She was 
 pretty, with the prcttincss of twenty ; round and 
 soft, fair and smooth. She had on an elaborately 
 rpasculinc shirt, and high stiff collar, and tic, and
 
 2o6 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR, ANSTRUTHER 
 
 pin, and belt ; and from under the edge of the 
 hard straw hat, tilted up at the back by masses of 
 burnished coils of hair, I saw a pulpy red mouth, 
 the tip of an indeterminate nose, and two un- 
 happy eyes, tired with crying. 
 
 " How early to begin," I said. 
 
 " Begin what ? " 
 
 " It's not nine yet. Do you always get your 
 crying done by breakfast-time ? " 
 
 She flushed all over her face. 
 
 "Forgive me," I said, industriously raking. 
 " I'm a rude person," 
 
 The girl was silent for a few moments, con- 
 sidering, I suppose, whether she should turn her 
 back on the impertinent stranger once and for all, 
 or forgive the indiscretion and make friends. 
 
 Well, she made friends. She and I, alone up 
 on the hill, the only creatures of anything like the 
 same age, sure to see each other continually in the 
 forests, on the road, over the fence, certainly we 
 were bound cither to a tiresome system of pre- 
 tending to be unaware of each other's existence or 
 to be friends. We are friends. It is the wisest 
 thing to be at all times. In ten days we have 
 become fast friends, and after the first six she left 
 off crying. 
 
 Now I'll tell you why we have done It so 
 quickly. It is not, as perhaps you know, my 
 practice to fall easily on the stranger's neck. I 
 am too lumbering, too slow, too acutely conscious 
 of my shortcomings for that ; really too dull and 
 too awkward for anything but a life almost
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 207 
 
 entirely solitary. But this girl has lately been in 
 love. It is the common fate. It happens to us 
 all. That in itself would not stir me to friend- 
 ship. The man, however, in defiance of German 
 custom, so strong on this point that the breaking 
 of it makes a terrific noise, after being publicly 
 engaged to her, after letting things go so far that 
 the new flat was furnished, and the wedding- 
 guests bidden, said he was afraid he didn't love 
 her enough, and gave her up. 
 
 When she told me that my heart went out to 
 her with a rush. I shall not stop to explain why, 
 but it did rush, and from that moment I felt that 
 I must put my arms round her, I, the elder and 
 quieter, take her by the hand, help her to dry her 
 poor silly eyes, pet her and make her happy again. 
 And really after six days there was no more cry- 
 ing, and for the last three she has been looking at 
 life with something of the critical indifference that 
 lifts one over so many tiresome bits of the road. 
 Unfortunately her mother doesn't like me. Don't 
 you think it's dreadful of her not to ? She fears 
 I am emancipated, and knows that I am Schmidt. 
 If I were a Wedel, or an Alvcnslebcn, or a 
 Schulcnburg, or of any other ancient noble family, 
 even an obscure member of its remotest branch, 
 she would consider my way of living and talking 
 merely as a thing to be smiled at with kind in- 
 dulgence. But she knows that I am Schmidt. 
 Nothing I can say or do, however sweet and sane, 
 can hide that horrid fact. And she knows that 
 my father is a careless child of nature, lamentably
 
 2o8 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 unimpressible by birth and office ; that my mother 
 was an Englishwoman with a name inspiring little 
 confidence ; and that we let ourstlves go to an 
 indecent indifference to appearances, not even try- 
 ing to conceal that we are poor. How useless it 
 is to be pleasant and pretty — I really have been 
 very pleasant to her, and the daughter kindly tells 
 me 1 am pretty — if you are both Schmidt and 
 poor. Though I speak with the tongues of 
 angels and have no family it avails me nothing. 
 If I had family and no charity I would get on 
 much better in the world, in defiance of St. Paul. 
 Frau von Lindeberg would take me to her heart, 
 think me distinguished where now she thinks me 
 odd, think me witty where now she thinks me 
 bold, listen to my speeches, laugh at my sallies, 
 be interested in my gardening and in my efforts 
 to live without meat ; but here I am, burning, 
 I hope, with charity, with love for my neigh- 
 bours, with ready sympathy, eager friendliness, 
 desire to be of use, and it all avails me nothing 
 because my name is Schmidt. 
 
 It is the first time I have been brought into 
 daily contact with our nobility. In Jena there 
 were very few : rare bright spots here and there 
 on the sober background of academic middle 
 class ; little stars whose shining even from a 
 distance made us blink. Now I see them every 
 day, and find them very chilly and not in the 
 least dazzling. I no longer blink. Perhaps Frau 
 von Lindeberg feels that I do not, and cannot, 
 forgive an unblinking Schmidt. But really, nov/,
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 209 
 
 these pretensions are very absurd. The free 
 blood of the Watsons surges within me at the 
 sight of them. I think of things like Albion's 
 daughters, and Britannia ruling waves, and I feel 
 somehow that it Is a proud thing to be partly 
 Watson and to have had progenitors who lived 
 in a house called The Acacias in a street called 
 Plantagenet Road, which is what the Watsons 
 did. What claims have these Lindebcrgs to the 
 breathless, nay, sprawling respect they apparently 
 demand ? Here is a retired Colonel who was 
 an officer all his life, and, not clever enough to 
 go on to the higher military positions, was obliged 
 to retire at fifty. He belongs to a good family, 
 and married some one of slightly better birth 
 than his own. She was a Freiin — Free Lady — 
 von Dammerlitz, a family, says Papa, large, un- 
 pleasant, and mortgaged. It has given Germany 
 no great warriors or statesmen. Its sons have all 
 been officers who did not turn that corner round 
 which the higher honours lie, and its daughters 
 either did not marry at all, being portionless, or 
 married impossible persons, said Papa, such as • 
 
 " Such as ? " I inquired, expecting to hear 
 they married postmen. 
 
 "Pastors, my dear," said Papa, smiling. 
 
 " Pastors ? " I said, surprised, pastors having 
 seemed to me, who view them from their own 
 level, eminently respectable and desirable as 
 husbands. 
 
 " But not from the Dammerlitz point of view, 
 my dear," said Papa.
 
 210 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 "Oh," said I, trying to imagine how pastors 
 would look seen from that. 
 
 Well, here are these people freezing us into 
 what they consider our proper place whenever 
 we come across them, taking no pains to hide 
 what undesirable beings we are in their sight, 
 staring at Papa's hat in eloquent silence when it 
 is more than usually tilted over one ear, running 
 eyes that chill my blood over my fustian clothes — 
 I'm not sure what fustian is, but I'm quite sure 
 my clothes are made of it — oddly deaf when we 
 say anything, oddly blind when we meet anywhere 
 unless we actually run into them, here they are, 
 doing all these things every day with a repeated 
 gusto, and with no reason whatever that I can 
 see to support their pretensions. Is it so wonder- 
 ful to be a von ? For that is all, look as I will, 
 that I can see they have to go on. They are 
 poor, as the retired officer invariably is, and they 
 spend much time pretending they are not. They 
 know nothing ; he has spent his best years pre- 
 occupied with the routine of his calling, which 
 leaves no room for anything approaching study 
 or interest in other things, she in bringing up 
 her son, also an officer, and in taking her daughter 
 to those parties in Berlin that so closely resemble, 
 I gather from the girl Vicki's talk, the parties In 
 Jena — a little wider, a little more varied, with 
 more cups and glasses, and with, of course, the 
 chance we do not have in Jena of seeing some 
 one quite new, but on the whole the same. He 
 is a solemn, elderly person in a black-rim^med
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 2 1 1 
 
 pince-neZy dressed in clothes that give one the 
 impression of always being black. He vegetates 
 as completely as any one I have ever seen or 
 dreamed of. Prolonged coffee in the morning, 
 prolonged newspaper-reading, and a tortoise-like 
 turn in the garden kill his mornings. Dinner, 
 says Vicki, kills another hour and a half; then 
 there is what we call the Dinner Sleep on the sofa 
 in his darkened room, and that brings him to 
 coffee-time. They sit over the cups till Vicki 
 wants to scream, at least she wants to since she 
 has known me, she says ; up to then, after her 
 miserable affair, she sat as sluggishly as the others, 
 but huddled while they wxre straight, and red- 
 cyed, which they were not. After coffee the 
 parents walk up the road to a certain point, and 
 walk back again. Then comes the evening paper, 
 which he reads till supper-time, and after supper 
 he smokes till he goes to bed. 
 
 "Why, he's hardly alive at all," I said to 
 Vicki, when she described this existence. 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. " It's what they 
 all do," she said, "all the retired. I've seen it 
 a hundred times in BcrHn. They're old, and 
 they never can start anything fresh." 
 
 "We won't be like that when we're old, will 
 we ? " I said, gazing at her wide-eyed, struck as 
 by a vision. 
 
 She gazed back into my eyes, misgiving 
 creeping into hers. 
 
 " Sleep, and cat, and read the paper ? " she 
 murmured.
 
 J 1 2 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Sleep, and eat, and read the paper ? " I 
 echoed. 
 
 And we stared at each other in silence, and 
 the far-away dim years seemed to catch up what 
 we had said, and mournfully droned back, " Sleep, 
 and eat, and read the paper. . . ." 
 
 But what is to be done with girls of good 
 family who do not marry and have no money ? 
 Thcy^ can't go governessing, and indeed it is a 
 dreary trade. Vicki has learned nothing except 
 a little cooking and other domestic drudgery, 
 only of use if you have a house to drudge in and 
 a husband to drudge for ; of those pursuits that 
 bring in money and make you independent and 
 cause you to flourish and keep green and lusty 
 she knows nothing. If 1 had a daughter I would 
 bring her up with an eye fixed entirely on a 
 husbandless future. She should be taught some 
 trade as carefully as any boy. Her head should 
 be filled with as much learnino- as it would con- 
 veniently hold side by side with a proper interest 
 in ribbons. 1 would spend my days impressing 
 her with the gloriousness of independence, of 
 having her time entirely at her own disposal, her 
 life free and clear, the world open before her, as 
 open as it was to Adam and Eve when they 
 turned their backs once and for all on the cloying 
 sweetness of Paradise, and far more interesting than 
 it was to them, for it would be full of inhabitants 
 eager to give her the hearty welcome always await- 
 ing those rare persons, the cheery and the brave. 
 
 *'Oh," sighed Vicki, when with great eloquence
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 21^ 
 
 and considerable elaboration I unfolded these 
 views, " how beautiful ! " 
 
 Papa was nearer the open window under which 
 we were sitting than I had thought, for he suddenly 
 popped out his head. 
 
 " It is a merciful thing, Rose-Marie," he said, 
 *' that you have no daughter." 
 
 We both jumped. 
 
 " She would be a most dreary young female," 
 he went on, smiling down as from a pulpit en 
 our heads, and wiping his spectacles. " Offspring 
 continually goaded and galvanized by a parent, 
 hammered upon, chiselled, beaten out flat " 
 
 "Dear me, Papachen," I murmured. 
 
 "Beaten out flat," said Papa, waving my inter- 
 ruption aside with his spectacles, " by the dead 
 weight of opinions already stale, the victims of a 
 system, the subjects of an experiment, the prisoners 
 of prejudice, are bound either to flare into rank 
 rebellion on the first opportunity or to grow con- 
 tinually drearier and more conspicuously stupid." 
 
 Vicki stared first up at Papa, then at me, her 
 soft, crumpled sort of mouth twisted into troubled 
 surprise. 
 
 Papa leaned further out and hit the window- 
 sill with his hand for all the world like a parson 
 hitting his pulpit's cushion. 
 
 " One word," he said, "one word of praise or 
 blame, one single word from an outsider will have 
 more cffl'Ct upon your offspring than years of 
 trouble taken by yourself, mountains of doctrine 
 preached by you, rivers of good advice, oceans of
 
 214 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 exhortations, cautions as numerous as Abraham's 
 posterity, well known to have been as numerous as 
 the sea sand, private prayers, and public admonition." 
 
 And he disappeared with a jerk. 
 
 " Ach^' said Vicki, much impressed. 
 
 Papa popped out his head again. " You may 
 believe me, Rose-Marie," he said. 
 
 " I do, Papachen," said I. 
 
 " You have to thank me for much." 
 
 " And I do," said I, heartily, smiling up at him. 
 
 "But for nothing more than for leaving you free 
 to put forth such shoots as your nature demanded 
 in whatever direction your instincts propelled 
 you." And he disappeared and shut the window. 
 
 Vicki looked at me doubtfully. " You said 
 beautiful things," she said, "and he said just the 
 opposite. Which is true 1 " 
 
 " Both," said I, promptly, determined not to 
 be outdone as a prophet by Papa. 
 
 Poor Vicki. It is so hard to have life turned 
 into a smudge when one is only twenty. She 
 adored this man, was so proud of him, so proud 
 of herself for being chosen by him. She grew, in 
 the year during which they were engaged, into 
 a woman, and can never now retrace her steps 
 back to that fairy place of sunshine and careless- 
 ness in which we so happily wander if we are left 
 alone for years and years after we are supposed to 
 be grown up. Do you realize what a blow in the 
 face she has received, as well as in her unfortunate 
 little heart ? All her vanities, without which a 
 girl is but a poor thing, shrivelled up, her
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 215 
 
 self-respect gone, her conceit, if there was any, and 
 I suppose there was because there always is, gone 
 headlong after it. A betrothal here is almost as 
 binding and quite as solemn as a marriage. It is 
 announced in the papers. It is abundantly cele- 
 brated. And the parents on both sides fall on 
 each other's necks and think highly of one 
 another till the moment comes for making settle- 
 ments. The Lindebergs spent all they had laid 
 by and borrowed more to buy the trousseau and 
 furnish the house. Vicki cried bitterly when she 
 talked of her table-napkins. She says there were 
 twelve dozen in twelve different patterns, and 
 each twelve was tied up with a pink ribbon 
 fastened by a buckle and a bow. They had to be 
 sold again at a grievous loss, and the family fled 
 from Berlin and the faces of their acquaintances, 
 faces crooked with the effort to sympathize when 
 what they really wanted to do, says Vicki, was to 
 smile, and came to this cheap place where they 
 can sit in obscurity darning up the holes in their 
 damaged fortunes. Frau von Lindeberg, who has 
 none of the torment of rejected love to occupy 
 her feelings and all the bitterness of the social and 
 financial blow, cannot help saying hard things to 
 Vicki, things pointed and poisoned with reproaches 
 that sometimes almost verge on taunts. The man 
 was a good parti for Vicki ; little money, but much 
 promise for the future, a good deal older than her- 
 self and already brilliant as an officer ; and during 
 the engagement the satisfied mother overflowed, as 
 mothers will, with love for the creditable daughter.
 
 2i6 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " It was so nice," said Vickl, dolefully sniffing. 
 " She seemed to love me almost as much as she 
 loves my brother. I was so happy. 1 had so 
 much. Then everything went at once. Mamma 
 can't bear to think that no one will ever want to 
 marry me now, because I have been engaged." 
 
 Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly 
 ever do both the persons love with equal enthu- 
 siasm, and if they do, what is the use ? It is all 
 bound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out 
 by the steady drizzle of marriage. And for the 
 others, for the masses of people who do not love 
 equally, of whom one half is at a miserable dis- 
 advantage, at the mercy absolutely of the other 
 half, what is there but pain in the end .'' And 
 yet — and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, 
 a sweet, darling thing. But, like a kitten, all 
 charm and delicious ways at first, innocent, soft, 
 enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling 
 rapidity and cruelly claws you. I'd like to know 
 if there's a single being on earth so happy and so 
 indifferent that he has not got hidden away 
 beneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings 
 the mark of Love's claws. And I think most of 
 the clawings are so ferocious that they are for a 
 long time ghastly tears that open and bleed again ; 
 and when with years they slowly dry up there is 
 always the scar, red and terrible, that makes you 
 wince if by any chance it is touched. That is 
 what I think. What do you think ? 
 
 Good-bye. 
 
 No, don't tell me what you think. 1 don't 
 want to know.
 
 XLVI 
 
 Galgenber^, Sept. 24. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Yesterday I was so 
 much absorbed by Vicki's woes that I never got 
 to what I really wanted to write about. It's that 
 book I found in the Jena bookshop. It was 
 second-hand and cheap, and I bought it, and it 
 has unkindly revenged itself by playing havoc 
 with my illusions. It is a collection of descrip- 
 tions of what is known of the lives of the English 
 poets, beginning with Chaucer, who is luckily too 
 far away to provide much tattle, and coming down 
 the centuries growing bigger with gossip as it 
 comes, till it ends with Rossetti and Fitzgerald 
 and Stevenson. Each poet has his portrait. It 
 was for that I bought it. I cannot tell you how 
 eagerly I looked at them. At last I was going to 
 see what Wordsworth looked like, and Coleridge, 
 and Keats, and Shelley. One of my dreams has 
 been to go to the National Portrait Gallery of 
 yours in London, described in an old Baedeker I 
 once saw, and gaze at the faces of those whose 
 spirits I know so well. Now I don't want to. 
 Can you imagine what it is like, what an ex- 
 tremely blessed state it is, only to have read the 
 
 works of a poet, the filtercd-out best of him, and 
 
 217
 
 2i8 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 to have lived so far from his country and from 
 biographies or collections of his letters that all 
 gossip about his private life and criticisms of his 
 morals are unknown to you ? Milton, Words- 
 worth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, have been to me 
 great teachers, great examples, before whose 
 shining image, built up out of the radiant 
 materials their works provided, I have spent 
 glorious hours in worship. Not a cloud, not a 
 misgiving has dimmed my worship. We need 
 altars — anyhow, we women do — and they were 
 mine. I have not been able to be religious in 
 the ordinary sense, and they have taken the place 
 of religion. Our own best poets, Goethe, Schiller, 
 Heine, and the rest, do not appeal to me in the 
 same way, Goethe is wonderful, but he leaves 
 you sitting somehow in a cold place from which 
 you call out at intervals with conviction that he is 
 immense the while you wish he would keep the 
 feet of your soul a little warmer. Schiller beats 
 his patriotic drum, his fine eyes rolling con- 
 tinually towards the gallery, too unintermittently 
 for perfect delight. Heine the exquisite, the 
 cunning worker in gems, the stringer of pearls 
 on frailest golden threads, is too mischievous, too 
 malicious, to be set up in a temple ; and then you 
 can't help laughing at his extraordinary gift for 
 maddening the respectable, at the extraordinary 
 skill and neatness with which he deposits poison 
 in their tenderest places, and how can he worship 
 who is being made to laugh ? If I knew little 
 about our poets' lives — inevitably I know more
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 219 
 
 than I want to — I still would feel the same. 
 There is, I think, in their poetry nothing 
 heavenly. It is true, I bless God for them, thank 
 Him for having let them live and sing, for having 
 given us such a noble heritage, but 1 can't go all 
 the way Papa goes, and melt in a bath of rapture 
 whenever Goethe's name is mentioned. I re- 
 member what you said about Goethe. It has not 
 influenced me. I do think you were wrong. 
 But I do, too, think that everything really 
 heavenly in our nation, everything purely in- 
 spired, manifestly immortal, has gone, not into 
 our poetry but into our music. That has ab- 
 sorbed our whole share of divine fire, and left our 
 poets nothing but the cool and conscious exercise 
 of their intellects. 
 
 Well, I am preaching. I would make a very 
 arrogant parson, wouldn't I, laying down the law 
 more often than the prophets from that safe 
 citadel a pulpit ; but please have patience, for I 
 want you to comfort me. The book really has 
 made me unhappy. It is the kind of book you 
 must go on reading — angry, rebelling at every 
 page, but never leaving it till you've reached the 
 last word. Then you throw it as hard as you 
 can into the furthest corner of the room, and 
 shake yourself as a dog docs come up out of 
 muddy water, and think to shake it off as easily 
 as he docs his mud ; but you can't, because it has 
 burned itself into your soul. 1 don't suppose 
 you will understand what I feel. When a person 
 possesses very few things those few things are
 
 220 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 terribly precious. See the mother of the only 
 child, and compare her conduct, when it coughs, 
 to the conduct of the mother of six, all cou^hino-. 
 See how one agonizes ; and see with what serenity 
 the other brings out her bottle of mixture and 
 pours it calmly down her children's throats. 
 Well, I'm like the first mother, and you are like 
 the second. I expect you knew long ago, and 
 have never minded knowing, the littlenesses of 
 my gods ; but I, I felt as unsettled while I read 
 about them, as uneasy, as fidgety, as frightened 
 as a horse being driven by somebody cruel, which 
 knows that every minute the lash will come down 
 in some fresh place. Think : I knew nothing 
 about Harriet Westbrook and her tragic life and 
 death ; I had never heard of Emilia Viviani ; of 
 Mary ; of her whose name was Eliza, but who 
 soared aloft in the sunshine of Shelley's admira- 
 tion re-christened Portia, only presently to descend 
 once more into the font and come out luridly as 
 the Brown Demon. I never knew that Keats 
 loved somebody called Brawne, and that she was 
 unwilling, that she saw little in him, in Endymion 
 the god-like, the divinely gifted, and that he was 
 so persistent, so unworthily persistent, that the 
 only word I can find that at all describes it is the 
 German zappehid. I had never heard of Jean 
 Armour, of the headlong descent from being 
 " him who walked in glory and in joy. Following 
 his plough along the mountain-side " to hopeless 
 black years spent in public-houses at the beck and 
 call — think of it, think of the divine spirit forced
 
 FR.\ULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 221 
 
 to it by its body — of any one who would pay for 
 a drink. I never knew about Coleridge's opium, 
 or that to Carlyle he appeared as a helpless Psyche 
 overspun with Church of England cobwebs, as a 
 weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man. I 
 never knew that Wordsworth's greeting was a 
 languid handtul of numb, unresponsive fingers, 
 that his speech was prolix, thin, endlessly diluted. 
 I never knew that Milton had three wives, that 
 the first one ran away from him a month after 
 their marriage, that he was hard to his daughters, 
 so hard that they wished him dead. All these 
 things I never knew ; and for years 1 have 
 been walking with glorious spirits, and have 
 been fed on honey-dew, and drunk the milk of 
 Paradise. When first 1 saw Wordsworth's por- 
 trait I turned cold. Don't laugh ; I did actually 
 turn cold. He had been so much in my life. I 
 had pictured him so wonderful. Calm ; beautiful, 
 with the loftiest kind of beauty ; faintly frosty at 
 times, and detached, yet gently cheery and always 
 dignified. It is the picture from a portrait by 
 some one called Hancock. Very bitterly do I 
 dislike Hancock. It is a profile. It would, if I 
 had seen it in the flesh, completely have hidden 
 from my silly short sight the inner splendours. 
 I'm afraid — oh, I'm afraid, and 1 shiver with 
 shame to think it — that I would have regarded 
 him only as an elderly gentleman of irreproach- 
 able character, out of whose way it was as well to 
 get because he showed every sign of being a bore. 
 Will you think me irretrievably silly when I tell
 
 222 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 you that I cried over that picture ? For one 
 dreadful moment I stared at it in startled horror ; 
 then I banged the book to and fled up into the 
 forest to cry. There was a smugness — but no, I 
 won't think of it. I'll upset all my theories 
 about the face being the mirror of the soul. It 
 can't be. If it is, Peter Bell and The 'Thorn are 
 accounted for ; but who shall account for the 
 bleak nobility, the communings with nature on 
 lofty heights in the light of setting suns } Or, 
 when he comes down nearer, for that bright world 
 he unlocks of things dear to memory, of home, of 
 childhood, of quiet places, of calm affections } 
 And for the tenderness with which it is done ? 
 And for its beautiful, simple goodness .'' 
 
 Coleridge's picture was another disillusion- 
 ment, but not so great a shock, because I have 
 loved him less. He was so rarely inspired. I 
 don't think you need more than the fingers of 
 one hand for the doing of sums with Coleridge's 
 inspirations. Still, it saddened me to be told he 
 was a helpless Psyche. I didn't like to hear 
 about his cobwebs. I hated being forced to 
 know of his weakness, of his wasted life growing 
 steadily dingier the farther he travelled from that 
 East that had seen him set out so bright with 
 morning radiance. Really, the world would be 
 a peaceful place if we could only keep quiet about 
 each other's weak points. "Why are we so rest- 
 less till we have pulled down, belittled, be- 
 smudged .'' You'll say that without a little malice 
 talk would grow very dull ; you'll tell me it is
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 223 
 
 the salt, the froth, the sparkle, the ginger in the 
 ginger-beer, the mustard in the sandwich. But 
 you must admit that it becomes only terrible 
 when it can't leave the few truly great spirits 
 alone, when it must somehow drag them down to 
 our lower level, pointing out — in writing, so that 
 posterity too shall have no illusions — the spots on 
 the sun, the weak places in the armour, and 
 pushing us, who want to be left alone praying in 
 the forecourt of the temple, down the area steps 
 into the kitchen. Two nights and two days have 
 I spent feverishly with that book. I dare not 
 hope that I shall forget it. I have never yet 
 forgotten undesirable, bad things. Now, when 
 I take my poets up with me into the forest, and 
 sit on one of those dusky pine-grown slopes 
 where the light is subdued to a mysterious grey 
 green and the world is quieted into a listening 
 silence, and far away below the roofs of Jena 
 glisten in the sun, and the white butterflies, like 
 white flowers come to life, flutter after each other 
 across the blue curtain of heat that hangs beyond 
 the trees, — now, when I open them and begin to 
 read the noble, familiar words, will not those 
 other words, those anecdotes, those personal 
 descriptions, those suggestions, those button- 
 holings, leer at me between the lines .'' Shall I, 
 straining my cars after the music, not be shown 
 now for ever only the instrument, and how piti- 
 fully the ivory has come off the keys ? Shall I, 
 hungering after my spiritual food, not have 
 pushed upon my notice, so that I am forced to
 
 2 24 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 look, the saucepan, tarnished and not quite clean, 
 in which it was cooked ? Please don't tell me 
 you can't understand. Try to imagine yourself 
 in my place. Come out of that gay world of 
 yours where you are talking or being talked to 
 all day long, and suppose yourself Rose-Marie 
 Schmidt, alone, in Jena, on a hill, with books. 
 Suppose yourself for hours and hours every day 
 of your life with nothing particular that you must 
 do, that you have no shooting, no hunting, no 
 newspapers, no novels. Suppose you are passion- 
 ately fond of reading, and that of all reading you 
 most love poetry. Suppose you have inherited 
 from a mother who loved them as much as you 
 do a precious shelf-full of the poets, cheap editions, 
 entirely free from the blight of commentaries, 
 foot-notes, and introductory biographies. And 
 suppose these books in the course of years have 
 become your religion, your guide, the source of 
 your best thoughts and happiest moments; — would 
 you look on placidly while some one scrawled 
 malicious truths between their lines .'' No, you 
 would not. You would feel as I do. Think 
 what the writers are to me, how I have built up 
 their personalities entirely out of the materials 
 they gave me in their work. They never told 
 me horrid things about themselves. Their spirits, 
 which alone they talked about, were serene and 
 white. I knew Milton was blind, because he 
 chose beautifully to tell me so. I knew he must 
 have been an appreciative and regretful husband, 
 because no husband who did not appreciate and
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 225 
 
 regret would go so far as to talk of his deceased 
 wife as his late espoused saint. I knew he was a 
 tender friend, a friend capable of deepest love and 
 sorrow, for, in spite of Johnson's "It is not to be 
 considered as the effusion of real passion," I was 
 convinced by the love and sorrow of Lycidas. I 
 knew he was a man whose spirit was dissolved 
 continually into the highest ecstasies, who lived 
 with all heaven before his eyes, — briefly, I said 
 Amen to Wordsworth's " His soul was like a 
 star, and dwelt apart." And now a series of 
 sordid little pictures rises up before me and 
 chokes my Amen. I cannot bear to think of him 
 having two or three olives for supper and a little 
 cold water, and then being cross to his daughters. 
 Of course he must be cross on such a supper. I 
 can't conceive it kind to drill the daughters so 
 strictly in languages they did not understand that 
 they could read them aloud to him with extra- 
 ordinary correctness. 1 shrink from the thought 
 of the grumbling there was in that house of 
 heavenly visions, grumbling and squabbling 
 stamped out, it is true, by the heavy parental 
 foot wherever noticed, but smouldering on from 
 one occasion to the other. I cannot believe — I 
 wish I could — that a child will dislike a parent 
 without cause ; the cause may be small things, 
 a series of trifles each of little moment, snubs too 
 often repeated, chills too often applied, stern 
 looks, short words, sarcasms, — and these, as you 
 and 1 both know, arc guite ordinary dulnesses, 
 often daily ingredients or family life ; but they sit 
 
 <2
 
 226 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 « 
 
 with a strange and upsetting grace on the poet of 
 Paradise, and I would give anything never to 
 have heard of them. 
 
 And then you know I loved Fitzgerald. He 
 had one of my best altars. You remember you 
 read Omar Khayyam twice aloud to me — once in 
 the spring (it was the third of April, a sudden 
 hot day, blue and joyous, slipped in to show God 
 had not forgotten us between weeks of hopeless 
 skies and icy winds) and once last September, 
 that afternoon we drifted down the river past the 
 town, away from houses, and people, and work, 
 and lessons, out to where the partridges scuttled 
 across the stubble and all the world was golden. 
 (That was the eleventh of September ; I am rather 
 good, you see, at dates.) Well, now I call him 
 Fitz, and laugh at the description of him going 
 about Suffolk lanes in a battered tall hat tied on 
 in windy weather by a handkerchief, and trailing 
 behind him, instead of clouds of glory, a shawl of 
 green and black plaid. It isn't, of course, in any 
 way a bad thing to trail shawls after you on 
 country walks ; there is nothing about it or him 
 that shocks or grieves ; he is very lovable. But 
 I don't want to laugh. I don't want to call him 
 Fitz. He is one of the gods in my temple, a 
 place from which I rigorously exclude the sense 
 of humour. I don't like gods who are amusing. 
 I cannot worship and laugh simultaneously. I 
 know that laughter is good, and I know that even 
 derision in small quantities is as wholesome as 
 salt ; but I like to laugh and deride outside holy
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 227 
 
 places, and not be forced to do it while I am on 
 my knees. 
 
 Now, don't say what on earth does the woman 
 want, because it seems to me so plain. What 
 the woman wants is that present and future poets 
 should wrap themselves sternly in an impenetrable 
 veil of anonymity. They won't, but she can go 
 on praying that they will. They won't, because 
 of the power of the passing moment, because of 
 the pleasantness of praise, of recognition, of per- 
 sonal influence, and, I suppose, but I'm not sure, 
 of money. Do you remember that merry rhymer 
 Prior, how he sang 
 
 'Tis long ago 
 Since gods came down incognito ? 
 
 Well, I wish with all my heart they had gone on 
 doing it a little longer. He wasn't, 1 think, de- 
 ploring what I deplore, the absence of a sense for 
 the anonymous in gods, of a sense of the dignity 
 of separation, of retirement, of mystery, wherever 
 there is even one spark of the Divine ; I think 
 he thought they had all been, and that neither 
 incognito nor in any other form would they appear 
 again. He implied, and so joined himself across 
 the centuries to the Walrus and the Carpenter, 
 that there were no gods to come. Well, he has 
 been dead over a hundred and eighty years, and 
 they have simply flocked since then. I'd like to 
 write the great names on this page, the names of 
 the poets, first and greatest of the gods, to raise 
 it to dignity and confound the ghost of Prior, but 
 I won't out of consideration for you.
 
 228 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Does not my enthusiasm, my mountain energy, 
 make you groan with the deadly fatigue of him 
 who has to listen and cannot share ? I'll leave 
 off. My letter is growing unbecomingly fat. 
 The air up here is so bracing that my very un- 
 happinesses seem after all full of zest, very vocal, 
 healthy griefs, really almost enjoying themselves. 
 I'll go back to my pots. I'm busy to-day, though 
 you mightn't think it, making apple jelly out of 
 our very own apples. I'll go back to my pots 
 and forget — no, I won't make a feeble joke I was 
 just going to make, because of what I know your 
 face would look like when you read it. After 
 all, I believe I'm more than a little bit frightened 
 of you. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt,
 
 XL VI I 
 
 Galgenberg, Sept. 30. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — How nice of you to 
 
 be so kind, to write so consolingly, to be so 
 
 patient in explaining where I am thinking wrong. 
 
 I burned the book in the kitchen fire, and felt 
 
 great satisfaction in clearing the house of its 
 
 presence. You are right ; I have no concern 
 
 with the body of a poet — all my concern is with 
 
 his soul, and the two shall be severely separated. 
 
 I am glad you agree with me that poets should 
 
 be anonymous, but you seem to have even less 
 
 hope that they ever will be than I have. At least, 
 
 I pray that they may ; you apparently take no 
 
 steps whatever to bring it about. You say that 
 
 experience teaches that we must not expect too 
 
 much of gods ; that the possible pangs of posterity 
 
 often leave them cold ; that they are blind to the 
 
 merits of bushels, and discern neither honour nor 
 
 profit in the use of those vessels of extinguishment ; 
 
 you fear that they will not change, and you exhort 
 
 me to see to it that their weakness shall not be an 
 
 occasion for my stumbling. That is very sensible 
 
 advice. But before your kind letter came a few 
 
 fresh autumn mornings had cleared a good deal 
 
 229
 
 230 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 of my first dejection away. If the gods won't 
 hide themselves I can, after all, shut my eyes. If 
 I may not rejoice in the divine in them with un- 
 distracted attention I will try at least to get all 
 the warmth I can from its burning. And I can 
 imitate my own dainty and diligent bees, and take 
 care to be absorbed oi\\y in their honey. You 
 make me ashamed of my folly In thinking I could 
 never read Burns again now that I knov/ about 
 his sins. I did secretly think so. I was sure of 
 it. I felt quite sick to see him tumbled from his 
 altar into the mud. Your letter shows me that 
 once again I have been foolish. Why, it has 
 verged on idiocy. I myself have laughed at 
 people in Jena, strictly pious people, who will 
 not read Goethe, who have a personally vindictive 
 feeling against him because of his different love- 
 affairs, and I have listened astonished to the fury 
 with which the proposal of a few universal-minded 
 persons to give Heine a statue was opposed, and 
 to the tone almost of hatred with which one 
 man whenever his name is mentioned calls out 
 Schmutzfink. About our poets I have been from 
 the beginning quite sane. But yours were some- 
 how more sacred to me ; sacred, 1 suppose, because 
 they were more mysterious, more distant — glorious 
 angel - trumpets through which God sent His 
 messages. I was so glad, I whose tendency is, 
 I am afraid, to laugh and criticize, to possess one 
 thing at which I could not laugh, to have a whole 
 tract of beauty in which I could walk seriously, 
 with downcast eyes ; and I thought I was never
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 231 
 
 going to be able to be serious there again. It 
 was a passing fit, a violent revulsion. If I like 
 carefully to separate my own soul and body, why 
 should I not do the same with those of other 
 sinners ? It has always seemed to me so quaint 
 the way we admit, the good nature with which 
 we reiterate, that we ape all wretched sinners. 
 We do it with such an immense complacency. 
 We agree so heartily, with such comfortable, re- 
 gretful sighs, when anybody tells us so ; but with 
 only one wretched sinner are we of a real patience. 
 With him, indeed, our patience is boundless. I 
 know this, I have always known it, and I will not 
 now, at an age when it is my hope to grow every 
 year a little better, forget it and be as insolently 
 intolerant as the man who shudders at the name 
 of Heine, will not read a line of him and calls 
 him Schmutzfink. That writer's books you tell 
 me about, the books the virtuous in England 
 will not read because his private life was disgrace- 
 ful, beautiful books, you say, into which went his 
 best, in which his spirit showed how bright it was, 
 how he had kept it apart and clean, 1 shall get 
 them all and read them all. No sinner, cursed 
 with a body at variance with his soul and able 
 in spite of it to hear the music of heaven and 
 give it exquisite expression, shall ever again be 
 identified by me with what at such great pains 
 he has kept white. I know at least three German 
 writers to whom the same thing happened, men 
 who live badly and write nobly. My heart 
 goes out to them. I think of them lame and
 
 132 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 handicapped, leading their muse by the hand with 
 anxious care so that her shining feet, set among 
 the grass and daisies along the roadside, shall not 
 be dimmed by the foulness through which they 
 themselves are splashing. They are caked with 
 impurities, but with the tenderest watchfulness 
 they keep her clean. She is their gift to the 
 world, the gift of their best, of their angel, of 
 their share of divinity. And the respectable, afraid 
 for their respectability, turn their backs in horror 
 and go and read without blinking ugly things 
 written by other respectables. Why, no priest 
 at the altar, however unworthy, can hinder the 
 worshipper from taking away with him as great 
 a load of blessings as he will carry. And a rose 
 is not less lovely because its roots are in corrup- 
 tion. And God Himself was found once in a 
 manger. Thank you, and good-bye. 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt,
 
 XLVIII 
 
 Galgenberg, Oct. 8, 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — We are very happy 
 here just now because Papa's new book, at which 
 he has been working two years, is finished. I am 
 copying it out, and until that is done we shall 
 indulge in the pleasantest day-dreams. It is our 
 time, this interval between the finishing of a book 
 of his and its offer to a publisher, for being 
 riotously happy. We build the most outrageous 
 casdes in the air. Nothing is certain, and every- 
 thing is possible. The pains of composition are 
 over, and the pains of rejection are not begun. 
 Each time we suppose they never will, and that 
 at last ears will be found respectfully ready to 
 absorb his views. Few and far between have the 
 ears been till now. His books have fallen as flat 
 as books can fall. Nobody wanted to hear all, 
 or even half, that he could tell them about Goethe. 
 Jena shrugged its shoulders, the larger world was 
 blank. The books have brought us no fame, no 
 money, some tragic hours, but much interest and 
 amuscmcjit. Always tragic hours have come 
 when Papa clutched at his hair and raved rude 
 things about the German public ; and when the 
 
 433
 
 2 34 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 money didn't appear there have been uncomfort- 
 able moments. But these pass ; Papa leaves his 
 hair alone ; and the balance remains on the side 
 of nice things. We don't really v/ant any more 
 monej, and Papa is kept busy and happy, and 
 just to see him so eager, so full of his work, 
 seems to v^arm the house with pleasant sunshine. 
 Once, for one book, a cheque did come ; and 
 when we all rushed to look we found it was for 
 two marks and thirty pfennings — "being the 
 amount due," said the accompanying stony letter, 
 " on royalties for the first year of publication." 
 Papa thought this much worse than no cheque at 
 all, and took it round to the publisher in the 
 molten frame of mind of one who has been 
 insulted. The publisher put his thumbs in the 
 armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, 
 gazed with refreshing coolness at Papa, who was 
 very hot, and said that as trade went it was quite 
 a good cheque, and that he had sent one that very 
 morning to another author — a Jena celebrity who 
 employs his leisure writing little books of riddles 
 — for ninety pfennings. 
 
 Papa came home beaming with the delicious 
 feeling that money was flowing in and that he 
 was having a boom. The riddle man was a 
 contemptuous acquaintance who had been heard 
 to speak lightly of Papa's books. Papa felt all 
 the sweetness of success, of triumph over a dis- 
 agreeable rival ; and since then we have looked 
 upon that special book as his opus magnum. 
 
 While 1 copy he comes in and out to ask me
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 235 
 
 where I have got to and if I like it. I assure 
 him that I think it delightful, and so honestly I 
 do in a way, but I don't think it will be the 
 public's way. It begins by telling the reader, 
 presumably a person in search of information 
 about Goethe, that Jena is a town of twenty 
 thousand inhabitants, of whom nineteen thousand 
 are apparently professors. The town certainly 
 does give you that impression as you walk about 
 its little streets, and at every corner meet the same 
 battered-looking persons in black you met at the 
 corner before ; but what has that to do with 
 Goethe ? And the pages that follow have nothing 
 to do with him either that I can see, being a dis- 
 quisition on the origin and evolution of the felt 
 hats the professors wear — dingy, slouchy things — 
 winding up with an explanation of their symbolism 
 and inevitableness, based on a carefully drawn 
 parallel between them and the kind of brains they 
 have to cover. From this point, the point of the 
 head-wear of the learned in our present year, he 
 has to work back all the way to Goethe *in Jena 
 a century ago. It takes him several chapters to 
 get back, for he doesn't go straight, being con- 
 stitutionally unable to resist turning aside down 
 the green lanes of moralizing that branch so 
 seductively off the main road and lead him at last 
 very far afield ; and when he does arrive he is 
 rather breathless, and flutters for some time round 
 the impassive giant waiting to be described, jerk- 
 ing out little anecdotes, very pleasant little 
 anecdotes, but quite unconnected with his patient
 
 236 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 subject, before he has got his wind and can 
 begin. 
 
 He is rosy with hope about this book. "All 
 Jena will read it," he says, " because they will like 
 to hear about themselves " — I wonder if they will 
 — " and all Germany will read it because it will 
 like to hear about Goethe." 
 
 *' It has heard a good deal about him already, 
 you know, Papachen," I say, trying gently to 
 suggest certain possibilities. 
 
 " England might like to have it. There has 
 been nothing since that man Lewes, and never 
 anything really thorough. A good translation, 
 Rose-Marie — what do you think of that as an 
 agreeable task for you during the approaching 
 winter evenings ? It is a matter worthy of con- 
 sideration. You will like a share in the work, a 
 finger in the literary pie, will you not ? " 
 
 " Of course I would. But let me copy now, 
 darling. I'm not half through." 
 
 He says that if those blind and prejudiced 
 persons publishers won't risk bringing it out he'll 
 bring it out at his own expense sooner than 
 prevent the world's rightly knowing what Goethe 
 said and did in Jena ; so there's a serious eventu- 
 ality ahead of us ! We really will have to live 
 on lettuces, and in grimmest earnest this time. 
 I hope he won't want to keep racehorses next. 
 Well, one thing has happened that will go a little 
 way towards meeting new expenses, — I go down 
 every day now and read English with Vicki, at 
 the desire of her mother, for two hours, her
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 237 
 
 mother having come to the conclusion that it is 
 better to legalize, as it were, my relations with 
 Vicki, who flatly refused to keep away from us. 
 So I am a breadwinner, and can do something to 
 help Papa. It is true I can't help much, for 
 what I earn is fifty pfennings each time, and as 
 the reading of English on Sundays is not con- 
 sidered nice, I can only altogether make three 
 marks a week. But it is something, and it is 
 easily earned, and last Sunday, which was the end 
 of my first week, I bought the whole of the 
 Sunday food with it, dinner and supper for us, 
 and beer for Johanna's lover, who says he cannot 
 love Jier unless the beer is a particular sort and 
 has been kept for a fortnight properly cold in the 
 coal-hole. 
 
 Since I have read with Vicki Frau von Linde- 
 berg is quite different. She is courteous with the 
 careful courtesy decent people show their de- 
 pendents ; kindly ; even gracious at times. She 
 is present at the reading, darning socks and 
 ancient sheets with her carefully kept fingers, and 
 she treats me absolutely as though 1 were attached 
 to her household as governess. She is no longer 
 afraid we will want to be equals. She asks me 
 quite often after the health of him she calls my 
 good father. And when a cousin of hers came 
 last week to stay a night, a female Dammerlitz 
 on her way to a place where you drink waters and 
 get rid of yourself, she presented me to her with 
 pleasant condescension as the klci?je Engldnderin 
 engaged as her daughter's companion. ^^ Einc
 
 238 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 recht Hebe ILiusgenossiHy^ she was pleased to add, 
 gently nodding her head at each word ; and the 
 cousin went away convinced I was a resident 
 official, and that the tales she had heard about the 
 Lindebergs' poverty couldn't be true. 
 
 "It's not scriptural," I complained to Vicki, 
 stirred to honest indignation. 
 
 "You mean, to say things not quite — not 
 quite ? " said Vicki. 
 
 " Such big ones," I fumed. " I'm not little. 
 I'm not English. I'm not a Haiisgefiossin. Why 
 such unnecessary ones } " 
 
 " Now, Rose-Marie, you do know why 
 Mamma said * little.* " 
 
 " It's a term of condescension." 
 
 " And Engl'dnderins are rather grand things to 
 have in the house, you know — expensive, I mean. 
 Always dearer than natives. Mamma only wants 
 Cousin Mienchen to suppose wc are well off." 
 
 "Oh," said I. 
 
 " You don't mind ? " said Vicki, rather 
 timidly, taking my hand. 
 
 " It does hurt me," said I, putting a little 
 stress on the "me," a stress implying infinite pos- 
 sible hurt to Frau von Lindeberg's soul. 
 
 " It is horrid," murmured Vicki, her head 
 drooping over her book. " I wish we didn't 
 always pretend we're not poor. We are. Poor 
 as mice. And it makes us so sensitive about it, 
 so afraid of anything's being noticed. We spend 
 our lives on tenterhooks — not nice things at all 
 to spend one's life on."
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 239 
 
 " Wriggly, uncomfortable things," I agreed. 
 
 " I believe Cousin Mienchen isn't in the least 
 taken in, for all our pains." 
 
 " I don't believe people ever are," said I ; 
 and we drifted into a consideration of the probable 
 height of our temperatures and colour of our ears 
 if we could know how much the world we pose 
 to really knows about us, if we could hear with 
 what thoroughness those of our doings and even 
 of our thoughts that we believed so secret are 
 discussed. 
 
 Frau von Lindeberg wasn't there, being too 
 busy arranging comforts for her cousin's journey 
 to preside, and so it was that we drifted un- 
 hindered from Milton into the foggier regions of 
 private wisdom. We are neither of us wise, but 
 it is surprising how talking to a friend, even to a 
 friend as unwise as yourself, clears up your brains 
 and lets in new light. That is one of the reasons 
 why I like writing to you and getting your 
 letters ; only you mustn't be offended at my 
 bracketing you, you splendid young man, with 
 poor Vicki and poor myself in the class Unwise. 
 Heaven knows 1 mean nothing to do with book- 
 learning, in which, I am aware, you most beauti- 
 fully excel. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-JVIarie Schmidt.
 
 XLIX 
 
 Galgenberg, Oct. 9. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I am very sorry indeed 
 
 to hear that your engagement is broken off. I 
 
 feared something of the sort was going to happen 
 
 because of all the things you nearly said and 
 
 didn't in your letters lately. Are you very much 
 
 troubled and worried .'' Please let me turn into 
 
 the elder sister for a little again and give you the 
 
 small relief of having an attentive listener. It 
 
 seems to have been rather an unsatisfactory time 
 
 for you all along. I don't really quite know 
 
 what to say. I am, anyhow, most sincerely sorry, 
 
 but I find it extraordinarily difficult to talk about 
 
 Miss Cheriton. It is, of course, lamentable that 
 
 our writing to each other should have been, as 
 
 you say it was, so often the cause of quarrels. 
 
 You never told me so, or I would at once have 
 
 stopped. You fill several pages with surprise that 
 
 a girl of twenty-two can be so different from what 
 
 she appears, that so soft and tender an outside can 
 
 have beneath it such unfathomable depths of 
 
 hardness. I think you have probably gone to 
 
 the other extreme now, and because you admired 
 
 so much are all the more violently critical. It i§ 
 
 240
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 2+1 
 
 probable that Miss Cheriton Is all that you first 
 thought her, unusually charming and sympathetic 
 and lovable, and your characters simply didn't 
 suit each other. Don't think too unkindly in 
 your first anger. I am so very sorry ; sorry for 
 you, who must feel as If your life had been 
 convulsed by an earthquake, and all its familiar 
 features disarranged ; sorry for your father's dis- 
 appointment ; sorry for Miss Cheriton, who must 
 have been wretched. But how Infinitely wiser to 
 draw back In time and not, for want of courage, 
 drift on Into that supreme catastrophe marriage. 
 You mustn't suppose me cynical In calling It a 
 catastrophe — perhaps I mean it only In Its harm- 
 less sense of denouement ; and if 1 don't I can't 
 see that It is cynical to recognize a spade when 
 you see It as certainly a spade. But do not let 
 yourself go to bitterness, and so turn into a cynic 
 yourself. You say Miss Cheriton apparently 
 prefers a duke, and are very angry. But why If, 
 as you declare, you have not really loved her for 
 months past, are you angry ? Why should she 
 not prefer a duke ? Perhaps he Is quite a nice 
 one, and you may be certain she felt at once, the 
 very instant, when you left off caring for her. 
 About such things It is as difficult for a woman to 
 be mistaken as it is for a barometer to be hood- 
 winked In matters mctcorologlc. It was that, and 
 never the duke, that first influenced her. 1 am 
 as sure of it as if 1 could sec into her heart. Of 
 course she loved you. But no girl with a spark 
 of decency would cling on to a reluctant lover. 
 
 R
 
 242 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 What an exceedingly poor thing in girls she 
 would be who did. I can't tell you how much 
 ashamed I am of that sort of girl, the girl who 
 clings, who follows, who laments — as if the world, 
 the splendid, amazing world, were empty of every- 
 thing but one single man, and there were no sun 
 shining, no birds singing, no winds blowing, no 
 hills to climb, no trees to sit under, no books to 
 read, no friends to be with, no work to do, no 
 heaven to go to. I feel now for the first time 
 that I would like to know Miss Cheriton. But 
 it is really almost impossibly difficult to write 
 this letter ; each thing I say seems something I 
 had better not have said. Write to me about 
 your troubles as often as you feel it helps you, 
 and believe that I do most heartily sympathize 
 with you both, but don't mind, and forgive me, 
 if my answers are not satisfactory. I am un- 
 practised and ill at ease, clumsy, limited, in this 
 matter of frank writing about feelings, a matter in 
 which you so far surpass me. But I am always 
 most sincerely your friend 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 Galgenberg, Oct. 15. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — It's not much use for 
 the absent to send bland advice, to exhort to 
 peace and a putting aside of anger, when they 
 have only general principles to go on. You 
 know more about Miss Cheriton than I do, and 
 I am obliged to believe you when you tell me 
 you have every reason to be bitter. But I can 
 make few comments. My mouth is practically 
 shut. Only, as you told me you long ago left off 
 caring for her, the smart you are feeling now 
 must be, it seems to me, simply the smart of 
 wounded vanity, and for that I'm afraid I have 
 no soothing lotion ready. Also, I am bound to 
 say that I think she was quite right to give you 
 up once she was sure you no longer loved her. 
 1 am all for giving up, for getting rid of things 
 grown rotten before it is too late, and the one less 
 bright spot I see on her otherwise correct conduct 
 is that she did not do it sooner. Don't think me 
 hard, dear friend. If I were your mother I would 
 blindly yearn over my boy. As it is, you must 
 forgive my unfortunate trick of seeing plainly. I 
 wish things would look more adorned to me, less 
 
 243
 
 24+ FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 palpably obvious and ungarnlshed. These tire- 
 some eyes of mine have often made me angry. 
 I would so much like to sympathize wholly with 
 you now, to be able to be indignant with Miss 
 Cheriton, call her a minx, say she is heartless, be 
 ready with all sorts of healing balms and syrups 
 for you, poor boy, in the clutches of a cruel 
 annoyance. But 1 can't. If you could love her 
 again and make it up, that indeed would be a 
 happy thing. As it is — and your letter sets all 
 hopes of the sort aside once and for ever — you 
 have had an escape ; for if she had not given you 
 up, I don't suppose you would have given her up 
 — I don't suppose that is a thing one often does. 
 You would have married her, and then Heaven 
 knows what would have become of your unfor- 
 tunate soul. 
 
 After all, you need not have told me you had 
 left off loving her. I knew it. I knew it at 
 the time. I knew it within a week of when it 
 happened. And I have always hoped — I cannot 
 tell you how sincerely — that it was only a mood, 
 and that you would go back to her again and be 
 happy. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt,
 
 LI 
 
 Galgenberg, Oct. 22. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — This is a world, it 
 seems to me, where everybody spends their time 
 falling out of love and making their relations un- 
 comfortable. I have only two friends, the rest 
 of my friends being acquaintances, and both have 
 done it or had it done to them. Is it then to 
 be wondered at that I should argue that if it 
 happens to both my friends in a set where there 
 are only two, the entire world must be divided 
 into those who give up and those who are given 
 up, with a Greek chorus of lamenting and ex- 
 planatory relatives as a finish ? Really one might 
 think that love, and its caprices, and its tantrums 
 — you see, I'm in my shrewish mood — makes up 
 the whole of life. Here's Vicki groaning in the 
 throes of a relapse because some one has written 
 that she met her late lover at a party and that 
 he ate only soup ; here she is overcome by this 
 picture, which she translates as a hankering in 
 spite of everything after her, and wanting to 
 write to him, and ready to console him, and 
 crying her eyes all red again, and no longer 
 taking the remotest interest in Comus or yi those 
 
 »45
 
 246 FR/iULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 frequent addresses of mine to her on Homely 
 Subjects, to which up to yesterday she listened 
 with such flattering respect ; and here are you 
 writing me the most melancholy letters, longer 
 and drearier than any letters ever were before, 
 filled with yearnings after something that certainly 
 is not Miss Cheriton — but beyond that certainty 
 1 can make out nothing. It is a strange and 
 wonderful world. I stand bewildered, with you 
 on one side and Vicki on the other, and fling 
 exhortations at you in turn. I try scolding, to 
 brace you, but neither of you will be braced. 
 I try sympathy, to soothe you, but neither of 
 you will be soothed. What am I to do ? May 
 I laugh ? Will that give too deep offence ^ I'm 
 afraid I did laugh over your father's cable from 
 America when the news of your broken engage- 
 ment reached him. You ask me what I think 
 of a father who just cables " Fool " to his son at 
 a moment when his son is being horribly worried. 
 Well, you must consider that cabling is expensive, 
 and he didn't care to put more than one word, 
 and if there had been two It might have made 
 you still angrier. But, seriously, 1 do see that it 
 must have annoyed you, and I soon left off being 
 so unkind as to laugh. It is odd how much 
 older I feel than either of you lamenters — quite 
 old and quite settled, and so objective somehow. 
 I hope being objective doesn't make one un- 
 sympathetic, but I expect it really rather tends 
 that way ; and yet if it were so, and I were as 
 hard and husky as I sometimes dimly fear I may
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 247 
 
 be growing, would you and Vicki want to tell 
 me your sorrows ? And other people do too. 
 Think of it, Papa Lindeberg, hitherto a long 
 narrow person buttoned up silently in black, 
 mysterious simply because he held his tongue, 
 a reader of rabid Conservative papers through 
 •black-rimmed glasses, and as numb in the fingers 
 as Wordsworth when he shakes my respectful 
 hand, has began to unbend, to unfold, to expand 
 like those Japanese dried flowers you fling into 
 water ; and having started with good mornings 
 and weather-comments and politics, and from 
 them proceeded to the satisfactorily confused 
 state of the British army, has gone on imper- 
 ceptibly but surely to confidential criticisms of 
 the mistakes made here at head-quarters in in- 
 variably shelving the best officers at the very 
 moment when they have arrived at what he 
 describes as their prime, and has now reached 
 the stage when he comes up through the orchard 
 every morning at the hour I am due for my 
 lesson to help me over the fence. He comes 
 up with much statcliness and deliberation, but 
 he does come up ; and we walk down together, 
 and every day the volume of his confidences in- 
 creases, and he more and more minutely describes 
 his grievances. I listen and nod my head, which 
 is easy, and apparently all he wants. His wife 
 stops him at once, if he begins to her, by telling 
 him with as much roundness as is consistent with 
 being born a Dammerlitz that the calamities that 
 have overtaken them arc entirely his fault. Why
 
 248 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 was he not as clever as those subordinates who 
 
 were put over his head ? she asks with dangerous 
 
 tranquilHty ; and nobody can answer a question 
 
 like that. 
 
 " It makes me twenty years younger," he 
 
 said yesterday as he handed me over the fence 
 
 with the same politeness I have seen in the 
 
 manner of old men handing large dowagers to 
 
 their places in a set of quadrilles, " to see your 
 
 cheerful morning: face." 
 
 ® . . . 
 " If you had said shining morning face you'd 
 
 have been quoting Shakespeare," said I. 
 
 "Ah yes. I fear my Shakespeare days are 
 done. I am now at the time of life when serious 
 and practical considerations take up the entire 
 attention of a man. Shakespeare is more suitable 
 now for my daughter than for me." 
 
 "But clever men do read him." 
 
 "Ah yes." 
 
 " Quite grown-up ones do." 
 
 "Ah yes." 
 
 " With beards." 
 
 "Ah yes." 
 
 " Real men." 
 
 " Ah yes, yes. Professors. Theatre people. 
 People of no family. People who have no 
 serious responsibilities on their shoulders. People 
 of the pen, not men of the sword. But officers 
 — and who in our country of the well-born is 
 not, was not, or will not be an officer .? — have 
 no time for general literature. Of course," he 
 added, with a slight bow, for he regards me as
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 249 
 
 personally responsible for everybody and every- 
 thing English, " we have all heard of him." 
 
 " Indeed ? " said I. 
 
 " When I was a boy," he said this morning, 
 ** I read at school of a young woman — a mytho- 
 logical person — called Hebe." 
 
 " She was the daughter of Juno and wild 
 lettuce," said I. 
 
 " It may be," he said. " The parentages of 
 the mythological period are curiously intricate. 
 But why is it, dear Friiulein Schmidt, that though 
 I can recollect nothing of her but her name, 
 whenever I see you you remind me of her ? " 
 
 Now, was not that very pleasant ? Hebe, the 
 restorer of youth to gods and men ; Hebe, the 
 vigorous and wholesome. Thoreau says she was 
 probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned 
 and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, 
 and that whenever she came it was spring. No 
 wonder I was pleased. 
 
 *' Perhaps it's because I'm healthy," said I. 
 
 " Is that it ^ " he said, obviously fumbling 
 about in his brain for the reason. And when he 
 got to the house he displayed the results of his 
 fumbling by saying, " But many people are 
 healthy." 
 
 " Yes," said 1 ; and left him to think it out 
 alone. 
 
 So now there are two nice young women I've 
 been compared to — you once said I was like 
 Nausicaa, and here a year later, a year in which 
 various rather salt and stinging waves have gone
 
 250 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 over my head, is somebody comparing me to 
 Hebe. Evidently the waves did me no harm. 
 It is true, on the other hand, that Papa Lindeberg 
 is short-sighted. It is also true that last night I 
 found a beautiful shining silvery hair insolently 
 flaunting in the very front of my head. " Yes, 
 yes, my dear," said Papa — my Papa — when 1 
 showed it him, " we are growing old." 
 
 "And settled. And objective," said I, care- 
 fully pulling it out before the glass. " And yet, 
 Papachen, inside me 1 feel quite young." 
 
 Papa chuckled. " Insides are no safe criterion, 
 my dear," he said. " It is the outside that tells." 
 
 "Tells what?" 
 
 " A woman's age." 
 
 Evidently I have not yet reminded my own 
 Papa of Hebe. 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 LII 
 
 Galgenberg, Oct. 28. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstrutiier, — Well, yes, I do think 
 you must get over it without much help from 
 me. You have a great deal of my sympathy, I 
 assure you ; far more than you think. I don't 
 put it into my letters because there's so much 
 of it that it would make them overweight. Also, 
 it would want a great deal of explaining. You 
 see, it's a different sort from what you expect, and 
 given for other reasons than those you have in 
 your mind ; and it is quite impossible to account 
 for in any way you are likely to understand. 
 But do consider what, as regards the broken-off 
 engagement, you must look like from my point 
 of view. Candidly, arc you a fit object for my 
 compassion ? I see you wandering now through 
 Italy in its golden autumn looking at all your 
 dear I.uinis and Bellinis and Botticellis and other 
 delights of your first growing up, and from my 
 bleak hilltop I watch you hungrily as you go. 
 November is nearly upon us, and we shiver under 
 leaden clouds and driving rain. The windows 
 are loose, and all of them rattle. The wind 
 screams through their chinks as though somebody 
 
 25'
 
 252 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 had caught it by the toes and was pinching it. 
 We can't see out for the raindrops on the panes. 
 When I go to the door to get a breath of some- 
 thing fresher than house air I see only mists, 
 and wreaths of clouds, and mists again, where a 
 fortnight ago lay a little golden town in a cup 
 of golden hills. Do you think that a person with 
 this cheerless prospect can pity you down there 
 in the sun ? I trace your bright line of march 
 on the map and merely feel envy. I am haunted 
 by visions of the many beautiful places and 
 climates there are In the world that I shall never 
 see. The thought that there are people at this 
 moment sitting under palm-trees or in the shadow 
 of pyramids fanning themselves with their hand- 
 kerchiefs while I am in my clammy room — the 
 house gets clammy, I find, in persistent wet 
 weather — not liking to light a lamp because it is 
 only three o'clock, and yet hardly able to see 
 because of the streaming panes and driving mist, 
 the thought of these happy people makes me 
 restive. I too want to be up and off, to run 
 through the wet pall hanging over this terrible 
 grey North down into places where sunshine 
 would dry the fog out of my hair, and brown 
 my face, and loosen my joints, and warm my 
 poor frozen spirit. I would change places with 
 you this minute if I could. Gladly would I take 
 the burden of your worries on to my shoulders, 
 and, carrying them like a knapsack, lay them at 
 the feet of the first Bellini Madonna I met and 
 leave them there for good. It would give me
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 253 
 
 no trouble to lay them down, those worries pro- 
 duced by other people. One little shake, and 
 they'd tumble off. Always things and places 
 have been more to me than people. Perhaps it 
 is often so with persons who live lonely lives. 
 Anyhow, don't at once cry out that I'm unnatural 
 and inhuman, for things are, after all, only filtered 
 out people — their ideas crystallized into tangible- 
 ness, their spirit taking visible form ; either they 
 are that, or they are, I suppose, God's ideas — 
 after all, the same thing put into shapes we can 
 see and touch. So that it's not so dreadful of 
 me to like them best, to prefer their company, 
 their silent teaching, although you will, I know, 
 lecture me and perhaps tell me I am petrifying 
 into a mere thing myself. Well, it is only fair 
 that you should lecture me, who so often lecture 
 you. 
 
 Yours quite meekly, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 LIII 
 
 Galgenberg, Nov. i. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I won't talk about it 
 any more. Let us have done with it. Let us 
 think of something else. I shall get tired of the 
 duke if you are not careful, so please save me 
 from an attitude so unbecoming. This is All 
 Saints' Day: the feast of white chrysanthemums 
 and dear memories. My mother used to keep it 
 as a day apart, and made me feel something of its 
 mysticalness. She had a table in her bedroom, 
 the nearest approach that was possible to an altar, 
 with one of those pictures hung above it of Christ 
 on the Cross that always make me think of 
 Swinburne's 
 
 God of this grievous people, wrought 
 After the likeness of their race — 
 
 do you remember ? — and candles, and jars of 
 flowers, and many little books ; and she used on 
 her knees to read in the little books, kneeling 
 before the picture. She explained to me that 
 the Lutheran whitewash starved her soul, and 
 that she wanted, however clumsily, to keep some 
 reminder with her of the manner of prayer in 
 England. Did I ever tell you how pretty she 
 
 254
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 255 
 
 was ? She was so very pretty, and so adorably 
 nimble of tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she 
 twinkled in the heavy Jena firmament like some 
 strange little star. She led Papa and me by the 
 nose, and we loved it. I can see her now ex- 
 pounding her rebellious theories, sitting limply — 
 for she was long and thin — in a low chair, but 
 with nothing limp about her flower-like face and 
 eyes shining with interest in what she was talking 
 about. She was great on the necessity, a necessity 
 she thought quite good for everybody but abso- 
 lutely essential for a woman, of being stirred up 
 thoroughly once a week at the very least to an 
 enthusiasm for religion and the life of the world 
 to come. She said there was nothing so good for 
 one as being stirred up, that only the well stirred 
 ever achieve great things, that stagnation never 
 yet produced a soul that had shot up out of reach 
 of fogs on to the clear heights from which alone 
 you can call out directions for the guidance of 
 those below. The cold, empty Lutheran churches 
 were abhorrent to her. " They are populated on 
 Sundays," she said, " solely by stagnant women — 
 women so stagnant that you can almost see the 
 duckweed growing on them." 
 
 She could not endure, and I, taught to see 
 through her eyes, cannot endure either, the chilly 
 blend of whitewash and painted deal pews in the 
 midst of which you are rc(juircd here once a week 
 to magnify the Lord. Our churches — all those 
 I have seen — arc either like vaults or barns, the 
 vault variety being slightly better and also more
 
 256 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 scarce. Their aggressive ugliness, and cold, 
 repellent service, keeping the congealed sinner at 
 arm's length, nearly drove my mother into the 
 Roman Church, a place no previous Watson had 
 ever wanted to go to. The churches in Jena , 
 made her think with the tenderest regard of the 
 old picturesque pre-Lutheran days, of the light 
 and colour and emotions of the Catholic services, 
 and each time she was forced into one she said 
 she made a bigger stride towards Rome. " Luther 
 was a most mischievous person," she would say, 
 glancing half defiantly through long eyelashes at 
 Papa. But he only chuckled. He doesn't mind 
 about Luther. Yet in case he did, in case some 
 national susceptibility should have been hurt, she 
 would get up lazily — her movements were as lazy 
 as her tongue was quick — and take him by the 
 ears and kiss him. 
 
 She died when she was thirty-five : sweet and 
 wonderful to the last. Not did her beauty suffer 
 in the least in the sudden illness that killed her. 
 " A lily in a linen-clout She looked when they 
 had laid her out," as your Meredith says ; and 
 on this day every year, this day of saints so dear 
 to us, my spirit is all the time in those long ago 
 happy years with her. I have no private altar in 
 my room, no picture of a " piteous Christ " — 
 Papa took that — and no white flowers in this 
 drenched autumnal place to show that I remember ; 
 nor do 1 read in the little books, except with 
 gentle wonderment that she should have found 
 nourishment in them, she who fed so constantly
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 257 
 
 on the great poets. But I have gone each All 
 Saints' Day for ten years past to church in Jena 
 in memory of her, and tried by shutting my eyes 
 to imagine I was in a beautiful place without 
 whitewash, or hideous, almost brutal, stained 
 glass. 
 
 This morning, knowing that If I went down 
 into the town I would arrive spattered with mud 
 up to my ears and so bedraggled that the pew- 
 opener might conceivably refuse me admission on 
 the ground that I would spoil her pews, I set out 
 for the nearest village across the hills, hoping 
 that a country congregation would be more used 
 to mud. I found the church shut, and nobody 
 with the least desire to have it opened. The 
 rain beat dismally down on my umbrella as I 
 stood before the blank locked door. A neglected 
 fence divided the graves from the parson's front 
 yard, protecting them, I suppose, as much as in 
 it lay, from the depredations of wandering cows. 
 On the other side of it was the parson's manure 
 heap, on which stood wet fowls mournfully in- 
 vestigating its contents. His windows, shut and 
 impenetrable, looked out on to the manure heap, 
 the fowls, the churchyard, and myself. It is a 
 very ancient church, picturesque, and with 
 beautiful lancet windows with delicate traceries 
 carefully bricked up. Not choosing to have 
 walked five miles for nothing, and not wishing to 
 break a habit ten years' old of praying in a 
 church for my darling mother's soul on this day 
 of souls and darling saints, I gathered up my 
 
 s
 
 258 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 skirts and splashed across the parson's pools and 
 knocked modestly at his door for the key. The 
 instant I did it two dogs from nowhere, two 
 infimous little dogs of that unpleasant breed from 
 which I suppose Pomcrania takes its name, rushed 
 at me, furiously barking. The noise was enough 
 to wake the dead ; and since nobody stirred in 
 the house or showed other signs of being 
 wakened, it became plain to my deductive intelli- 
 gence that its inmates couldn't be dead. So I 
 knocked again. The dogs yelled again. 1 stood 
 looking at them in deep disgust, quite ashamed 
 of the way in which the dripping stillness was 
 being rent because of me. A soothing umbrella 
 shaken at them only increased their fury. They 
 seemed, like myself, to grow more and more 
 indignant the longer the door was kept shut. At 
 last a servant opened it a few inches, eyed me 
 with astonishment, and when she heard my 
 innocent request eyed me with suspicion. She 
 hesitated, half shut the door, hesitated again, and 
 then, saying she would go and see what the Herr 
 Pastor had to say, shut the door quite. I do not 
 remember ever having felt less respectable. The 
 girl clearly thought I was not ; the dogs clearly 
 were sure I was not. Properly incensed by the 
 shutting of the door and the expression on the 
 girl's face, I decided that the only dignified course 
 was to go away ; but I couldn't because of the dogs. 
 The girl came back with the key. She looked 
 as though she had a personal prejudice against 
 me. She opened the door just wide enough for
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 259 
 
 a lean person to squeeze through, and bade me, 
 with manifest reluctance, come in. The hall 
 had a brick floor and an umbrella-stand. In 
 the umbrella-stand stood an umbrella, and as the 
 girl, who walked in front of me, passed it, she 
 snatched out the umbrella and carried it with 
 her, firmly pressed to her bosom. I did not at 
 once grasp the significance of this action. She 
 put me into an icy shut-up room and left me to 
 myself. It was the gute Stube — good room — room 
 used only on occasions of frigid splendour. Its 
 floor was shiny with yellow paint, and to meet 
 the difficulty of the paint being spoiled if people 
 walked on it, and that other difficulty of a floor 
 being the only place you can walk on, strips of 
 cocoanut matting were laid across it from one 
 important point to another. There was a strip 
 from the door to the window ; a strip from the 
 door to another door ; a strip from the door 
 to the sofa ; and a strip from the sofa on 
 which the caller sits to the chair on which sits the 
 callee. A baby of apparently brand newness was 
 crying in an adjoining room. I waited, listening 
 to it for what seemed an interminable time, not 
 daring to sit down because it is not expected in 
 Germany that you shall sit in any house but your 
 own until specially requested to do so. I stood 
 staring at the puddles my clothes and umbrella 
 were forming on the strip of matting, vainly 
 trying to rub them out with my feet. The wail 
 of the unfortunate in the next room was of an 
 yninterruptcd and haunting melancholy. The
 
 26o FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 rain beat on the windows forlornly. As minute 
 after minute passed and no one came, I grew 
 very restless. My fingers began to twitch and 
 my feet to tap. And I was cooling down after 
 my quick walk with a rapidity that meant a cough 
 and a sore throat. There was no bell, or I would 
 have rung it and begged to be allowed to go 
 away. I did turn round to open the door and 
 try to attract the servant's notice and tell her I 
 could wait no longer, but I found to my astonish- 
 ment that the door was locked. After that the 
 whole of my reflections were resolved into one 
 chaotic Dear me, from which I did not emerge 
 till the parson appeared through the other door, 
 bringing with him a gust or wailing from the 
 unhappy baby within and of the characteristic 
 smell of infant garments drying at a stove. 
 
 He was cold, suspicious, inquisitive. Evidently 
 unused to being asked for permission to go into 
 his church, and equally evidently unused to 
 persons passing through a village which was, for 
 most persons, on the way to nowhere, he en- 
 deavoured with some skill to discover what I was 
 doing there. With equal skill I evaded answering 
 his questions. They included inquiries as to my 
 name, my age, my address, my father's profession, 
 the existence or not of a husband, the number of 
 my brothers and sisters, and distinct problngs 
 into the size of our income. It struck me that 
 he had a great deal of time and very few visitors, 
 except thieves. Delicately I conveyed this im- 
 pression to him, leaving out only the thieves, by
 
 FR!4uLEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANST'RUTHER 261 
 
 means of implications of a vaguely flattering 
 nature. He shrugged his shoulders, and said it 
 was too wet for funerals, which were the only 
 things doing at this time of the year. 
 
 " What, don't they die when it is wet ? " I 
 asked, surprised. 
 
 " Certainly, if it is necessary," said he. 
 
 " Oh," said I, pondering. " But if some one 
 does he has to be buried ? " 
 
 "We put it off," said he. 
 
 "Put it off?" 
 
 " We put it off," he repeated firmly. 
 
 " But " I began, in a tone of protest. 
 
 " There's always a fine day if one waits long 
 enough," said he. 
 
 " That's true," said I, struck by a truth I had 
 not till then consciously observed. 
 
 He did not ask me to sit down, a careful eye, 
 I suppose, having gauged the probable effect of 
 my wet clothes on his dry chairs, so we stood 
 facing each other on the strip of matting throwing 
 questions and answers backwards and forwards 
 like a ball. And I think I played quite skilfully, 
 for at the end of the game he knew little more 
 than when we began. 
 
 And so at last he gave me the key, and 
 having with a great rattling of its handle con- 
 cealed that he was unlocking the door, and 
 further cloaked this process by a pleasant comment 
 on the way doors stick in wet weather, which 
 I met with the cold information that ours didn't, 
 he whistled off the dogs, and 1 left him still with 
 an inquiry in his eye.
 
 262 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 The church is very ancient and dates from 
 the thirteenth century. You would like its outside 
 — I wonder if in your walks you ever came here 
 — but its inside has been spoilt by the zealous 
 Lutherans and turned into the usual barn. In 
 its first state of beauty in those far-off Catholic 
 days what a haven it must have been for all the 
 women and most of the men of that lonely 
 turnip-growing village ; the one beauty spot, 
 the one place of mystery and enthusiasm. No 
 one, 1 thought, staring about me, could possibly 
 have their depths stirred in the middle of so 
 much whitewash. The inhabitants of these bald 
 agricultural parishes are not sufficiently spiritual 
 for the Lutheran faith. Black gowns and bare- 
 ness may be enough for those whose piety is so 
 exalted that ceremonies are only a hindrance to 
 the purity of their devotions ; but the ignorant 
 and the dull, if they are to be stirred, and 
 especially the women who have entered upon 
 that long series of grey years that begins for 
 those worked gaunt and shapeless In the fields 
 somewhere about twenty-five and never leaves oflF 
 again, if they are to be helped to be less forlorn 
 need many ceremonies, many symbols, much 
 show, and mystery and awfulness. You will say 
 that it is improbable that the female inhabitants 
 of such a poor parish should know what it is to 
 feel forlorn ; but I know better. You will, 
 turning some of my own words against me, tell 
 me that one does not feel forlorn if one is worked 
 hard enough ; but I know better about that too
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 263 
 
 — and I said it only in reference to young men 
 like yourself. It is true, the tragedy of the faded 
 face combined with the uncomfortably young 
 heart, which is the tragedy that every woman 
 who has had an easy life has to endure for quite 
 a number of years, finds no place in the existence 
 of a drudge ; it is true, too, that I never yet saw, 
 and I am sure you didn't, a woman of the labour- 
 ing classes make efforts to appear younger than 
 she is ; and it is also true that I have seldom 
 seen, and I am sure you haven't, women of the 
 class that has little to do leave off making them. 
 Ceaseless hard work and the care of many children 
 do away very quickly with the youth both of face 
 and heart of the poor man's wife, and with the 
 youth of heart go the yearnings that rend her whose 
 heart, whatever her face may be doing, is still with- 
 out a wrinkle. But drudgery and a lost youth do 
 not make your life less, but more dreary. These 
 poor women have not, like their husbands, the 
 solace of the public-house Schnaps. They go 
 through the bitterness of the years wholly with- 
 out anaesthetics. Really I don't think I can let 
 you go on persisting that they feel nothing. 
 Why, we shall soon have you believing that only 
 you in this groaning and travailing creation 
 suffer. Please divest yourself of these illusions. 
 Read, my young friend, read the British poet 
 Crabbc. Read him much ; ponder him more. 
 He knew all about peasants. He was a plain 
 man, with a knack for rhyme and rhythm that 
 sets your brain ajingling for weeks, who saw
 
 26+ FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 peasants as they arc. They must have been the 
 very ones we have here. In his pages no honey- 
 suckle clambers picturesquely about their path, 
 no simple virtues shine in their faces. Their 
 hearth is not snowy, their wife not neat and 
 nimble. They do not gather round bright fires 
 and tell artless tales on winter eveninsfs. Their 
 cheer is certainly homely, but that doesn't make 
 them like it, and they never call down blessings 
 upon it with moist uplifted eyes, Grandsires with 
 venerable hair are rather at a discount ; the young 
 men's way of trudging cannot be described as 
 elastic ; and their talk, when there is any, does 
 not consist of praise of the local landowner. 
 Do you think they do not know that they 
 are cold and underfed ? And do not know 
 they have grown old before their time through 
 working in every sort of weather ? And do 
 not know where their rheumatism and fevers 
 come from ? 
 
 I walked back through the soaking, sighing 
 woods thinking of these things and of how un- 
 fairly the goods of life are distributed and of the 
 odd tendency misfortunes have to collect them- 
 selves together in one place in a heap. Old 
 thoughts, you'll say ; old thoughts are stale as 
 life, thoughts that have drifted through countless 
 heads, and after a while drifted out of them aealn, 
 leaving no profit behind them. But one can't 
 help thinking them and greatly marvelling. Make 
 the most, you fortunate young man, of freedom, 
 and Italy, and sunshine, and your six and twenty
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 265 
 
 years. If I could only persuade you to let your- 
 self go quite simply to being happy ! Our 
 friendship, in spite of its sincerity, has up to now 
 been of so little use to you ; and a friendship 
 which is not helpful might just as well not exist. 
 I wish I knew what words of mine would help 
 you most. How gladly would I write them. 
 How gladly would I see you in untroubled 
 waters, forging straight ahead towards a full and 
 fruitful life. But I am a foolish, ineffectual 
 woman, and write you waspish letters when I 
 might, if I had more insight, have found out 
 what those words are that would set you tingling 
 with the joy of life. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 I've been reading some of the very beautiful 
 prayers in my mother's English Prayer-book to 
 make up for not having prayed in church to-day. 
 Its margins are thickly covered with pencilled 
 comments. In parts like the Psalms and Canticles 
 they overflow into the spaces between the verses. 
 They are chiefly notes on the beauties of thought 
 and language, and comparisons with similar 
 passages in the Bible. Here and there between 
 the pages are gummed little pictures ot Madonnas 
 and " piteous Christs." But when the Athana- 
 sian Creed is reached the tone of the comments 
 changes. Over the top of it is written, " Some one 
 has said there is a vein of dry humour running 
 through this Creed that is very remarkable."
 
 266 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 And at the end of each of those involved 
 clauses that try quite vainly, yet with an air of 
 defying criticism, to describe the undescribable, 
 my mother has written with admirable caution 
 « Perhaps."
 
 LIV 
 
 Galgenberg, Nov. 7. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — So you are coming to 
 
 Berlin next month. I thought you told me in 
 
 one of your letters that Washington was probably 
 
 going to be your first diplomatic post. Evidently 
 
 you are glad it is not ; but if I were going to be 
 
 an attache I'd much rather be it at Washington 
 
 than Berlin, the reason being that I've not been 
 
 to Washington and I have been to Berlin. Why 
 
 are you so pleased — forgive me, I meant so much 
 
 pleased, but it is strange how little instinct has to 
 
 do with grammar — about Berlin ? You didn't 
 
 like it when you were here and went for two days 
 
 to look at it. You said it was a hard white place, 
 
 full of broad streets with nobody in them. You 
 
 said it was barren, soulless, arid, pretentious, 
 
 police-ridden ; that everybody was an official, and 
 
 that all the officials were rude. You were furious 
 
 with a policeman who stared at you without 
 
 answering when you asked him the way. You 
 
 were scandalized by the behaviour of the men in 
 
 the local trains, who sat and smoked in the faces 
 
 of the standing women, and by those men who 
 
 walked with their female relations in the streets 
 
 267
 
 268 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 and caused their parcels to be carried by them. 
 You came home to us saying that Jena was best, 
 and you were thankful to be with us again. I 
 went to Berlin once, a little while before you 
 came to Germany, and didn't like it either. But 
 I didn't like it because it was so full, because 
 those streets that seemed to you so empty were 
 bewildering to me in their tumultuous traffic — so 
 you see how a place is what your own eye makes 
 it, your Jena or your London eye ; and I didn't 
 like it, besides, because we spent a sulphuric night 
 and morning with relations. The noise of the 
 streets all day and the sulphur of the relations at 
 night spoilt it for me. We went there for a 
 jaunt, to look at the museums and things, and 
 stay the night with Papa's brother who lives there. 
 He is Papa's younger brother, and spends his 
 days in a bank, handing out and raking in money 
 through a hole in a kind of cage. He has a pen 
 behind his ear — I know, because we were taken 
 to gaze upon him between two museums — and 
 wears a black coat on weekdays as well as on 
 Sundays, which greatly dazzled my stepmother, 
 who was with us. 1 believe he is eminently 
 respectable, and the bank values him as an old 
 and reliable servant, and has made him rich. His 
 salary is eight thousand marks a year — four 
 hundred pounds, sir ; four times as much as 
 what we have — and my stepmother used often 
 and fervently to wish that Papa had been more 
 like him. 1 thought him a terrifying old uncle, 
 a parched, machine-like person, whose soul seemed
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 269 
 
 withdrawn into unexplorable vague distances, 
 reduced to a mere far-ofF flicker by the mechanical 
 nature of his work. He is ten years younger 
 than Papa, but infinitely more faded. He never 
 laughs. He never even smiles. He is rude to 
 his wife. He is withering to his daughters. He 
 made me think of owls as he sat at supper that 
 night in his prim clothes, with round gloomy 
 eyes fixed on Papa, whom he was lecturing. 
 Papa didn't mind. He had had a happy day, 
 ending with two very glorious hours in the Royal 
 Library, and Tante Else's herring salad was much 
 to his taste. " Hast thou no respect, Heinrich," 
 he cried at last, when my uncle, warmed by beer, 
 let his lecture slide over the line that had till 
 then divided it from a rating ; " hast thou then no 
 respect for the elder brother, and his white and 
 reverend hairs ? " 
 
 But Onkel Heinrich, aware that he is the 
 success and example of the family, and as in- 
 tolerant as successes and examples are of laxer 
 and poorer relations, waved Papa's banter aside 
 with conteinpt, and proposed that instead of 
 wasting any more of an already appallingly wasted 
 life in idle dabblings in so-called literature he too 
 should endeavour to get a post, however humble, 
 in a bank in Berlin, and mend his ways, and earn 
 an income of his own, and cease from living on 
 an income acquired by marriages. 
 
 My stepmother punctuated his words with 
 nods of approval. 
 
 ♦*\Vhat, as a doorkeeper, ch, thou cistern
 
 270 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 filled with wisdom ? " cried Papa, lifting his glass 
 and drinking gaily to Tante Else, who glanced 
 uneasily at her husband, he not yet having been, 
 to her recollection, called a cistern. 
 
 " It is better," said my stepmother, to whom 
 a man so punctual, so methodical, and so well- 
 salaried as Onkel Heinrich seemed wholly ideal, 
 " it is better to be a doorkeeper in — in " 
 
 She was seized with doubt as to the applica- 
 bility of the text, and hesitated. 
 
 " A bank ? " suggested Papa, pleasantly. 
 
 " Yes, Ferdinand, even in a bank rather than 
 dwell in the tents of wickedness." 
 
 "That," explained Papa to Tante Else, 
 leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands 
 comfortably over what, you being English, 1 v/ill 
 call his chest, " is my dear wife's poetic way " 
 
 " Scriptural way, Ferdinand," interrupted my 
 stepmother. " I know no poetic ways." 
 
 " It is the same thing, meine Liebste, The 
 scriptures are drenched in poetry. Poetic way, 
 I say, of referring to Jena." 
 
 ^^ Ach so,^' said Tante Else, vague because she 
 doesn't know her Bible any better than the rest 
 of us Germans ; it is only you English who have 
 it at your fingers' ends ; and, of course, my 
 stepmother had it at hers. 
 
 "Tents," continued Tante Else, feeling that 
 as Hausfrau it was her duty to make herself 
 conversationally conspicuous, and anxious to hide 
 that she was privately at sea, " tents are unwhole- 
 some as permanent dwellings. I should say a
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 271 
 
 situation somewhere as doorkeeper in a healthy 
 building was much to be preferred to living in 
 nasty draughty things like tents." 
 
 " Quatsch,'' said Onkel Heinrich, with sudden 
 and explosive bitterness; you remember, of course, 
 that quatsch is German for silly, or nonsense, and 
 that it is far more expressive, and also more rude, 
 than either. 
 
 My stepmother opened her mouth to speak, 
 but Tante Else, urged by her sense of duty, 
 flowed on. 
 
 " You cannot," she said, addressing Papa, 
 "be a doorkeeper unless there is a door to keep." 
 
 " Let no one," cried Papa, beating approving 
 hands together, " say again that ladies are not 
 logicians." 
 
 " Quatsch^'' said Onkel Heinrich. 
 
 " And a door is commonly a — a " She 
 
 cast about for the word. 
 
 " A necessity } " suggested Papa, all bright 
 and pleased attention. 
 
 "A convenience?" suggested my cousin 
 Lieschen, the rather pretty unmarried daughter, 
 a girl with a neat head, an untidy body, and 
 plump red hands. 
 
 " An ornament ? " suggested my cousin Els- 
 chen, the rather pretty married daughter, another 
 girl with a neat head, an untidy body, and plump 
 red hands. 
 
 " A thing you go in at ? " I suggested. 
 
 " No, no," said Tante Else, impatiently, 
 determined to run down her word.
 
 272 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 "A thing you go out at, then?" said I, 
 proud of the rcsourcefuhiess of my intelligence. 
 
 " No, no," said Xante Else, still more im- 
 patiently. '''' Ach Gott, where do all the words 
 get to "i " 
 
 " Is it something very particular for which 
 you are searching ? " asked my stepmother, with 
 the sympathetic interest you show in the search- 
 ino-s of the related rich. 
 
 " Something not worth the search, we may be 
 sure," remarked Onkcl Hcinrich. 
 
 " Ach Gott,'' said Tante Else, not heeding 
 him, "where do they " She clasped and un- 
 clasped her fingers ; she gazed round the room 
 and up at the ceiling. We all sat silent, feeling 
 that here there was no help, and watched while 
 she chased the elusive word round and round her 
 brain. Only Onkel Heinrich continued to eat 
 herring salad with insulting emphasis. 
 
 " 1 have it," she cried at last, triumphantly. 
 
 We at once revived into a brisk attention, 
 
 " A door is a characteristic " 
 
 " A most excellent word," said Papa, en- 
 couragingly. " Continue, my dear." 
 
 " It is a characteristic of buildings that are 
 massive and that have windows and chimneys like 
 other buildings." 
 
 " Excellent, excellent," said Papa. " Defini- 
 tions are never easy." 
 
 " And — and tents don't have them," finished 
 Tante Else, looking round at us with a sort of 
 mild surprise at having succeeded in talking so
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 273 
 
 much about something that was neither neigh- 
 bours nor housekeeping. 
 
 " Ouatsch'' said Onkel Heinrich. 
 
 " My dear," protested Tante Else, forced at 
 last to notice these comments. 
 
 " I say it is quatsch^' said Onkel Heinrich, 
 with a volcanic vehemence startling in one 
 so trim. 
 
 " Really, my dear," said Tante Else. 
 
 " I repeat it," said Onkel Heinrich. 
 
 " Do you not think, my dear " 
 
 " 1 do not think, 1 know. Am I to sit silent, 
 to have no opinion, in my own house ? At my 
 own table ? " 
 
 " My dear " 
 
 " If you do not like to hear the truth, refrain 
 from talking nonsense." 
 
 " My dear Heinrich — will you not try — in 
 the presence of — of relations, and of — of our 
 
 children " Her voice shook a little, and 
 
 she stopped, and began with great haste and 
 exactness to fold up her table-napkin. 
 
 ''^ Ach — quatsch" said Onkel Heinrich again, 
 irritably pushing back his chair. 
 
 He waddled to a cupboard — of course he 
 doesn't get much exercise in his cage, so he can 
 only waddle — and took out a box of cigars. 
 
 " Come, Ferdinand," he said, "let us go and 
 smoke together in my room and leave the dear 
 women to the undisturbed enjoyment of their 
 wits. 
 
 " I do not smoke," said Papa, briefly. 
 
 T
 
 274 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Come, then, while I smoke," said Onkel 
 Hcinrich. 
 
 " Nay, I fear thee, Heinrich," said Papa. 
 " I fear thy tongue applied to my weak places. 
 I fear thine eye, measuring their deficiencies. 1 
 fear thy intelligence, known to be great " 
 
 "Worth exactly," said Onkcl Heinrich, sud- 
 denly facing us, the cigar-box under his arm, his 
 cross owl's eyes rounder than ever, " worth 
 exactly, on the Berlin brain market, eight thousand 
 marks a year." 
 
 " 1 know, I know," cried Papa, " and I 
 admire — I admire. But there is awe mingled 
 with my admiration, Heinrich — awe, respect, 
 terror. Go, thou man of brains and marketable- 
 ness, thou man of worth and recognition, go and 
 leave me here with these lesser intellects. I fear 
 thee, and I will not watch thee smoke." 
 
 And he got up and raised Tante Else's hand 
 to his lips with great gallantry, and wished her, 
 after our pleasant fashion at the end of meals, a 
 good digestion. 
 
 But Tante Else, though she tried to smile 
 and return his wishes, could not get back again 
 into her role of serene and conversational Haus- 
 frau. My uncle waddled away, shooting a sniff 
 of scorn over his shoulder as he went, and my 
 aunt endeavoured to conceal the fact that she was 
 wiping her eyes. Lieschen and Elschen began to 
 talk to me both at once. My stepmother cleared 
 her throat, and remarked that successful public 
 men often had to pay for their successes by being
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 275 
 
 the victims at home of nerves, and that their 
 wives, whose duty it is always to be loving, might 
 be compared to the warm and soothing iron 
 passed over a shirt newly washed, and deftly, by 
 its smooth insistence, flattening away each crease. 
 
 Papa gazed at my stepmother with admiring 
 astonishment while she elaborated this image. 
 He had hold of Xante Else's hand and was 
 stroking it. His bright eyes were fixed on his 
 wife, and I could see by their expression that he 
 was trying to recall the occasions on which his 
 own creases had been ironed out. 
 
 With the correctness with which one guesses 
 most of a person's thoughts after you have lived 
 with him ten years, my stepmother guessed what 
 he was thinking. 
 
 "I said public men," she remarked, "and I 
 said successes." 
 
 " I heard, I heard, meine Liebste^'' Papa assured 
 her, " and I also completely understand." 
 
 Pie made her a little bow across the table. 
 " Do not heed him. Else, my dear," he added, 
 turning to my aunt. "Do not heed thy Heinrich 
 — he is but a barbarian." 
 
 " Ferdinand ! " exclaimed my stepmother. 
 
 "Oh no," sighed Xante l^lsc, "it is 1 who 
 am impatient and foolish." 
 
 " 1 tell thee he is a barbarian. He always 
 was. In the nursery he was, when, yet unable to 
 walk, he crawled to that spot on the carpet where 
 stood my unsuspecting legs the while my eyes 
 and hands were busy with the playthings on the
 
 276 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 tabic, and fastening his youthful teeth into them 
 made holes in my flesh and also in my stockings, 
 for which, when she saw them, my mother 
 whipped me. At school he was, when, carefully 
 stalking the flea gambolling upon his garments, 
 he secured it between a moistened finger and 
 thumb, and, waiting with the patience of the 
 savage sure of his prey, dexterously transferred 
 it, at the moment his master bent over his desk 
 to assure himself of his diligence, to the peda- 
 gogue's sleeve or trouser, and then looked on 
 with that glassy look of his while the victim, 
 returned to his place on the platform, showed an 
 ever-increasing uneasiness, culminating at last in 
 a hasty departure and a prolonged absence. As 
 a soldier he was, for I have been told so by those 
 comrades who served with and sufi^ered from him, 
 but whose tales I will not here repeat. And as a 
 husband — yes, my dear Else, as a husband he has 
 not lost it — he Is, undoubtedly, a barbarian." 
 
 " Oh no, no," sighed Tante Else, yet listening 
 with manifest fearful interest. 
 
 " Ferdinand," said my stepmother, angrily, 
 " your tongue is doing what it invariably does, it 
 is running away with you." 
 
 " Why are married people always angry with 
 each other ? " asked Lieschen, the unmarried 
 daughter, in a whisper. 
 
 " How can I tell, since I am not married ? " 
 I answered in another whisper. 
 
 " They are not," whispered Elschen, with all 
 the authority of the lately married. " It is only
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 277 
 
 the old ones. My husband and I do not quarrel. 
 We kiss." 
 
 " That is true," said Lieschen, with a small 
 giggle which was not without a touch of envy. 
 "I have repeatedly seen you doing it." 
 
 " Yes," said Elschen, placidly. 
 
 " Is there no alternative ? " I inquired. 
 
 "No what ?" 
 
 "Alternative." 
 
 " I do not know what you mean by alterna- 
 tive, Rose-Marie," said Elschen, trying to twist 
 her wedding-ring round on her finger, but it 
 couldn't twist because it was too deeply em- 
 bedded. " Where do you get your long words 
 from ? " 
 
 " Must one either quarrel or kiss ? " I asked. 
 " Is there no serene valley between the thunderous 
 heights on the one hand and the swampy enerva- 
 tions on the other ? " 
 
 To this Elschen merely replied, while she 
 stared at me, " Grosser Gotty 
 
 " You are a queer cousin," said Lieschen, 
 giggling again, the giggle this time containing a 
 touch of contempt, her giggles never being wholly 
 unadulterated. " I suppose it is because Onkel 
 Ferdinand is so poor." 
 
 " I expect it is," said I. 
 
 " He has hardly any money, has he ? " 
 
 " I believe he has positively none." 
 
 " But how do you live at all } " 
 
 " I can't think. It must be a habit." 
 
 "You don't look very fat."
 
 278 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 *' How can I, when I'm not ? " 
 
 "You must come and see my baby," said 
 Elschcn, apparently irrelevantly, but I don't think 
 it really was ; she thought a glimpse of that, I am 
 sure, refreshing baby would cure most heart- 
 sicknesses. 
 
 " Yes, yes, it is a splendid baby," said Lies- 
 chen, brightening, " and its wardrobe is trimmed 
 throughout with the best Swiss embroidery 
 threaded with beautiful blue ribbons. It cost 
 many hundred marks, I assure you. There is 
 nothing that is not both durable and excellent. 
 Elschen's mother-in-law is a very rich lady. She 
 gave it all. She keeps two servants, and they 
 wear washing dresses and big white aprons, just 
 like English servants. Elschen's mother-in-law 
 says it is a great expense because of the laundry 
 bills, but that she doesn't mind. If you were 
 going to stay longer, and had got the necessary 
 costumes, we might have taken you to see her, 
 and she might perhaps have asked you to stay to 
 coffee." 
 
 Really .? " said I, in a voice of concern. 
 Yes. It is a pity for you. You would then 
 see how elegant Berlin people are. I expect this " 
 — she waved her hand — " is quite different from 
 Jena, and seems strange to you, but it is nothing, 
 I assure you, nothing at all, compared to Elschen's 
 mother-in-law's furniture and food." 
 
 " Really ? " said I, again with concern. 
 
 I did a dreadful thing next morning at break- 
 fast : I broke a jug. Never shall I forget the 

 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 279 
 
 dismay and shame of that moment. Really, I am 
 rather a deft person, used to jugs, and not, as a 
 rule, of hasty or unconsidered movements. It 
 was, I think, the electric current streaming out of 
 Onkel Heinrich that had at last reached me too 
 and galvanized me into a nervous and twitching 
 behaviour. He came in last, and the moment he 
 appeared words froze, smiles vanished, eyes fell, 
 and Papa's piping alone continued to be heard in 
 the cheerless air. I don't know what had passed 
 between him and Tante Else since last we had 
 seen him, but his opaque black eyes were crosser 
 and blacker than ever. Perhaps it was only that 
 he had smoked more than was good for him, and 
 the whole family was punished for that over- 
 indulgence. I could not help reflecting how 
 lucky it was that we were his relations and not 
 hers ; what must happen to hers if they ever come 
 to see her I dare not think. It was while I was 
 reflecting on their probable scorched and shrivelled 
 condition, and at the same time was eagerly pass- 
 ing him some butter that I don't think he wanted 
 but that 1 was frantically afraid he might want, 
 that my zealous arm swept the milk-jug off the 
 table, and it fell on the varnished floor, and with 
 a hideous clatter of what seemed like malicious 
 satisfaction smashed itselt to atoms. 
 
 " There now," cried my stepmother, casting up 
 her hands, " Rose-Marie all over." 
 
 " I am very sorry," I stammered, pushing 
 back my chair and gathering up the pieces, and 
 mopping up the milk with my handkerchief.
 
 28o FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Dear niccc, it is of no consequence," faltered 
 Tante Else, her eyes anxiously on her husband. 
 
 " No consequence ? " cried he — and his words 
 sounded the more terrific from their being the 
 first, beyond a curt good morning, that he had 
 uttered. *' No consequence ? " 
 
 And when my shameful head reappeared above 
 the table and I got on to my feet and carried the 
 ruins to a sideboard, murmuring hysterical apolo- 
 gies as I went, he pointed with a lean finger to 
 what had once been a jug, and said, with an owlish 
 solemnity and weightiness of utterance I have 
 never heard equalled — 
 
 " It was very expensive." 
 
 I can't tell you how glad, how thankful I was 
 to get home. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt,
 
 LV 
 
 Galgenberg, Nov. 15. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I shall send this to 
 Jermyn Street, as it can no longer catch you in 
 Italy. Jena is not on the way from London to 
 Berlin, and I don't know what map persuaded 
 you that it was. It is very fiiithful and devoted 
 of you to want so much to see Professor Martens 
 again, but you know he is a busy man, and for 
 five minutes with him as he rushes from a lecture 
 to a private lesson it hardly seems worth while to 
 make such a tremendous detour. Why, you 
 would be hours pottering about on branch lines 
 and at junctions, and would never, 1 am certain, 
 see your luggage again. Still, it is not for me to 
 refuse your visit to Professor Martens on his 
 behalf, who as yet knows nothing about it. 1 
 merely advise ; and you know 1 do not easily 
 miss an opportunity of doing that. 
 
 What another odd idea of yours to want to 
 call on our Berlin relations. Has Italy put these 
 various warm genialities into your head .'' I did 
 not think 1 had made the Heinrich Schmidts 
 attractive. I was shivering wliile I wrote with re- 
 newed horror, as the remembrance of that evening 
 
 a8i
 
 2S2 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 with them and of that morning rose up again 
 before me. That the result should be a thirst on 
 your part for their address fills me with astonish- 
 ment. Do you want to go and do them good ? 
 Soften Onkel Heinrich, and teach him to cherish 
 kind Tante Else with the meek blue eyes and 
 claret-coloured silk dress ? You cannot seriously 
 intend to set up regular social intercourse with 
 them. It is certain you will never meet them at 
 any party you go to — no, not even Elschen's 
 mother-in-law. The classes are with us divided 
 so rigorously that the needle's eye was child's 
 play to the camel compared to this other entering. 
 You will, very properly, remembering my clois- 
 tered life, inquire what I know about it ; but it 
 seems to me — only please don't laugh — that I have 
 seen and known quite a good deal. When Ex- 
 perience leaves gaps, quick Imagination fills them 
 up. The straws I have noticed have been enough 
 to show me which way the wind was blowing ; 
 and women, pray remember, are artists at putting 
 two and two together. Therefore I prophesy 
 that if you are at the English Embassy in Berlin 
 fifty years and meet fresh people every day of 
 them, among those people will never be Onkel 
 Heinrich and Tante Else. What, then, is the 
 use of giving you their address ? I will, if you 
 really seriously wish it ; but I must warn you that 
 they would be intensely surprised by a call from 
 you, and it would in no way add to their comfort. 
 The connecting thread is altogether too slender. 
 Papa is not a relation whose introductions they
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 283 
 
 value, and to come from him is a handicap rather 
 than a recommendation. Do you know the only- 
 possible conclusion they would come to ? — and 
 come to it they certainly would — that somehow, 
 somewhere, in a tram, or a shop, or walking, you 
 had seen Lieschen, and had fallen in love with 
 her. And before you knew where you were you 
 would be married to Lieschen. 
 
 How sad to have to come away from the 
 flaming Spanish chestnuts of Italy and turn your 
 face towards London fogs. You don't seem to 
 mind. You never do seem to mind the thino^s 
 that would fill my heart with leaden despair, and 
 over other things that should not matter you cry 
 out. Indeed, far from minding, you seem eager 
 to be off. Yet London can't be nice in November, 
 and Berlin, where you so soon will be, is simply 
 horrid. It was in November that we v/ere there, 
 and we splashed about in a raw, wet cold — rain 
 on the verge of sleet and snow, a bitter wind at 
 the corners, the omnibuses all full (wc could not 
 afford the dearer and more respectable tram), and 
 everybody we met had an unkind strange face 
 that stared at us, in spite of hurry and umbrellas, 
 with a thoroughness and comprehensiveness that 
 must be peculiar to Berlin. Papa's galoshes 
 didn't fit and kept coming off, and they always 
 did it at the most difficult moment, generally 
 when we were crossing a street, and there they 
 would lie, scattered beneath hoofs and wheels, till 
 I had rescued them again. Also his umbrella, 
 being old and never having been very strong,
 
 28+ FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 turned inside out at extra gusty corners, and we, 
 who had come to look and wonder, found that 
 the Berlin people thought we had come to be 
 looked and wondered at. But do not let me 
 damp your ardour with these gloomy tales. It 
 is such an excellent thing that you should be 
 ardent at all, after this long while of dissatisfaction 
 with life, that 1 ought to cheer you on and not 
 talk dreary. Besides, your umbrella won't mind 
 corners, and you do not wear galoshes. I wish 
 you joy, then, of your new post, and hope you 
 will be very happy in it. Papa was most interested 
 to hear you were coming so near us, and sends 
 you many messages, whose upshot is that you are 
 to be a good boy and do him credit. He doesn't 
 know about the unfortunate ending to your 
 engagement, and I shall not tell him, for he would 
 be sorry ; and more and more, as the days and 
 months melt away into a dream, I am anxious that 
 he should not be made sorry. Do you not think 
 that old people should never be made sorry ? 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Ros£-Mari£ Schmidt. 
 
 1 hope you will waste no precious time coming 
 to Jena to see Professor Martens. I heard a 
 rumour that he was ill, or away or something, 
 so that you would have your long and extnmely 
 tiresome journey positively for nothing.
 
 LVI 
 
 Galgenterg, Nov. 25. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Was it so short? I 
 don't remember. This one shall be longer, then. 
 Tell me, do you think, there is any use in trying 
 to cure a person of being in love ? I have come 
 to the conclusion that it's hopeless. Such cures 
 must be made from the inside outwards, and not 
 from the outside inwards. I thought I was going 
 to stir Vicki to a noble independence, and you 
 should have heard the speeches I made her. 
 Sometimes I had to laugh at them myself, they 
 were such extraordinarily heroic and glowing 
 things for one dripping Frilulein with none too 
 brave a heart to hurl at another dripping Frilulein 
 with no brave heart at all, as they trotted along 
 with shortened skirts and umbrellas through wind- 
 racked, howling forests. Vicki has gone all to 
 pieces again, and her eyes are redder than ever. 
 1 don't know whether it is these November mists 
 that have done it, but certainly after all my haul- 
 ing of her up the rocks of proud sclt-sufficicncy 
 she has flopped back again deeper than before 
 into the morass in which I found her. It's a 
 perfect bog of sentiment she's sunk in now. I 
 
 185
 
 286 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 make her go for ten-mile walks, and aim at doing 
 them in two hours, thus hoping to bring out her 
 love-sickness in the form of healthy perspiration, 
 but it's no good. " Oh," gasps Vicki, when we 
 start off up the sombre aisles of pines, and see 
 them stretching away before us into a grey infinity, 
 and mark their reeking trunks, black with damp, 
 hoar with lichen, and hear their sighings and 
 their creakings through the patter of rain on our 
 umbrellas, and feel their wet breath on our cheeks, 
 " oh, what an empty, frightening world it is 1 " 
 
 Then I tell her, with what enthusiasm I may, 
 that it's not, that it's beautiful, that we are young 
 and strong, that our life can be made just exactly 
 as glorious as we are energetic enough to make 
 it. And she doesn't believe a word ; she simply 
 shakes her head, and moans that she isn't energetic. 
 
 "But you are," I say, with a fine show of 
 confidence. "Come, let us walk faster. Who 
 would dare say you were not who saw you now.-* " 
 
 " Oh 1 " wails Vicki ; and trots along blowing 
 her nose. 
 
 Poor little soul. I've tried kissing her, and 
 it did no good either, I petted her for a whole 
 day ; sat with my arms round her ; had her head 
 on my shoulder ; whispered every consolation I 
 could think of; but unfortunately the only person 
 who has ever petted her was the faithless one, 
 and it made her think of him with renewed agony, 
 and opened positive sluices of despair. I've tried 
 scolding her — the " My dear Vicki, really for a 
 woman grown " tone, but she gets so much of
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 287 
 
 that from her mother, and, besides, she isn't a 
 woman grown, but only a poor, unhappy, cheated 
 little child. But how dull, how dry, how profit- 
 less are the comfortings of one woman for another. 
 I feel it in every nerve the whole time I am 
 applying them. One kiss from the wretched man 
 himself and the world blazes into radiance. A 
 thousand of the most beautiful and eminent 
 verities enunciated by myself only collect into a 
 kind of frozen pall that hangs about her miserable 
 little head and does nothing more useful than 
 suffocate her. She has been inclined to feel bad 
 ever since the fatal letter about the soup, but 
 there were intervals in which with infinite haul- 
 ings 1 did get her up on to the rocks again, those 
 rocks she finds so barren, but from whose tops 
 she can at least see clearly and be kept dry. Now 
 that this terrible weather has come upon us, and 
 every day is wetter and sadder than the last, she 
 has collapsed entirely. If I could write as well 
 as Papa I would like to write an essay on the 
 connection between a wet November and the 
 renewed buddings of love. Frau von Lindeberg 
 is dreadfully angry, and came up, and actually 
 came in, a thing she has not done yet, and sat 
 on the sofa, carefully enthroned in its middle 
 and well spread out in case I should so far forget 
 myself as to want to sit upon it too, and asked 
 me what nonsense I had been putting into the 
 child's head. 
 
 "Nonsense.''" I exclaimed, remembering my 
 noble talk.
 
 288 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " She was getting over it. You must have 
 said something." 
 
 " Said something ? Yes, indeed I said some- 
 thing. Never has one person said so many things 
 before." 
 
 She stared in amazement. "What," she 
 cried, "you actually — you dared — you have the 
 effrontery " 
 
 " Shall I tell you what I said .? " 
 
 And for an hour I gave the astonished lady, 
 hemmed in on the sofa by the table and by my 
 chair, the outlines of my views on ideals and 
 conduct. I made the most of the hour. The 
 outlines were very thick. No fidgeting or 
 attempts to stop me were considered. She had 
 come to scold ; she should stay to learn. 
 
 *' Well, well," she said, when I, tired of talk- 
 ing, got up and removed the impeding table with 
 something of the brisk politeness of a dentist 
 unhooking the patient's bib and screwing down 
 his chair after he has done his worst, "you seem 
 to be a good sort of girl. You have, I see, meant 
 no harm." 
 
 " Meant no harm ? I neither meant it nor 
 did I do it. Allow me to make the point 
 
 clearer " And I prepared to push back the 
 
 table upon her and begin again. 
 
 "No, no — it is quite clear, thank you. 
 Kindly go on endeavouring, then, to influence my 
 unhappy child for good. 1 trust your excellent 
 father is well. Good morning." 
 
 But influence as I may, Vicki has given up
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 289 
 
 wearing those starched shirts with the high linen 
 collars and neat ties in which she first dazzled me, 
 and has gone into nondescript woollen clothes 
 something like mine. She says it is because of 
 the washing bills, but I know it to be but a 
 further symbol of her despair. The one remnant 
 of her first trimness is her beautifully brushed 
 hair. Stooping over her to see that her English 
 exercises are correct, I like to lay my cheek a 
 moment on it, so lightly that she does not notice, 
 for it is wonderful stuff — soft, wavy, shining, and 
 ought alone, without the little ear and curve of 
 the young cheek, without the silly pretty mouth 
 and kind straightforward eyes, to have immeshed 
 that stupid man beyond all possibility of dis- 
 entangling himself She was not made for Milton 
 and the Muses. Nature, carving her out, mould- 
 ing her body and her mind, putting in a dimple 
 here and giving an eyelash an extra curl there, 
 had a pleasant eye on a firelit future for Vicki, a 
 cosy, sheltered future with a fender for her feet, 
 a baby for each arm, and an adored husband 
 coming in at the end of the day to be fed and 
 kissed. But this man has outwitted Nature. He 
 weighed, with true German caution, Vicki and 
 her dimples against the tiny portion which was 
 all he could extract from her parents, and found 
 them not heavy enough to make up for the 
 alarming emptiness of that other scale. Now 
 Vicki's fender and babies and busy happy life 
 have vanished into the land of Never Will Bc's. 
 She will not find some one else to take his place. 
 
 u
 
 290 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 She has a story attached to her : a fatal thing 
 here for a girl. Unlike your Miss Cheriton, who 
 gently waves you aside and engages herself with- 
 out the least difficulty to a duke, Vicki is a 
 marked person, and will be avoided by our careful 
 and calculating young men. She is doomed never 
 to spoil and tease those babies, never to spoil and 
 worship that husband. Instead, she will, for a 
 year, continue to range the hills here with me, 
 trying to listen politely to my admonishments 
 while inwardly she shudders at the loneliness and 
 vastness of the forests and of life, and then her 
 parents' lease will be up, and they and she will 
 drift down into some little town in the Harz 
 where retired officers finish lives grown vegetable, 
 and the years will pounce upon her and strip her 
 one by one of her little stock of graces. Don't 
 suppose I blame the man, because 1 don't ; I only 
 resent that he should have so much the best of it. 
 There is no law obliging a man to marry because 
 some lovesick girl wants him to — if I were a 
 man 1 would never marry — but I do deplore the 
 exceeding number of the girls who want him to. 
 If each girl would say her prayers and go her own 
 v/ay, go about her business, her parents having 
 seen to it that she should have a business to go 
 about, what a cheerful, tearless place the world 
 would be. And you must forgive my vociferous- 
 ness, but really I have had a woeful morning with 
 Vicki, who cried so bitterly into the pages of my 
 Milton that the best part o^ Samson Agonistes is stuck 
 together, and all the red has come off the edges.
 
 FIL^ULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 291 
 
 Papa Lindeberg came in at the end of the 
 lesson to offer me his umbrella to go home with. 
 
 " It is a wet day, Fraulein Hebe," said he, 
 looking round. 
 
 " It is," said I, gazing ruefully at my poor 
 Milton. 
 
 " Even the daughters of the gods," said he — 
 thus mildly do we continue to joke together — 
 " must sometimes use umbrellas." 
 
 "Yes," said I, smiling at this pleasant old 
 man, this old man I thought at first so disagree- 
 able ; and he went with me to the door, and 
 asked me in an anxious whisper what I thought 
 of Vicki. " It lasts long — it lasts long," said he, 
 helplessly. 
 
 " Yes," said I, standing under the umbrella in 
 the rain, while he in the porch rubbed one hand 
 mechanically over the other and stared at me. 
 
 "You are a very fortunate young lady," he 
 said wistfully. 
 
 " I ? " 
 
 "Our poor Vicki — if she were more like 
 
 you 
 
 "Like me ? " 
 
 " It is so clear that you have never known this 
 terrible malady of love. You have the face of a 
 joyful Backfischy 
 
 " Oh ! " — I began to laugh ; and laughed and 
 laughed till the umbrella shook showers of rain- 
 drops off each of its points. 
 
 He stood watching me thoughtfully. " It is 
 true," he said.
 
 292 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Oh ! " was all I could ejaculate ; for, Indeed, 
 the idea made mc very merry. 
 
 " No member of our sex," said he, *' has ever 
 even for a moment caught what is still a bright 
 and untouched maiden fancy." 
 
 "There was a young man once," 1 began, "in 
 the Jena cake-shop " 
 
 "y^f//," he interrupted, waving the young 
 man and his cakes away with an impatient move- 
 ment of the hand. 
 
 " I didn't know," said I, " that you could 
 read people's pasts." 
 
 " Yours is easy enough to read. It is shining 
 so clearly in your eyes, it is reflected so limpidly 
 in your face " 
 
 " How nice 1 " said I, interrupting In my turn, 
 for my feet were getting grievously wet ; and 
 you note, I hope, with what Industriousness I 
 preserve and record anything of a flattering 
 nature that any one ever says to me. 
 
 But you shall hear the other side too ; for 1 
 turned away, and he turned away, and before I 
 had gone a yard my shoelace came undone and 
 I had to go back to the shelter of the porch to tie 
 it up, and while I had my foot on the scraper and 
 was bending down tying a bow and a knot that 
 should last me till I got home, I heard Frau von 
 Lindeberg from the parlour off the passage make 
 him the following speech : — 
 
 " I am constantly surprised, Ludwig, at the 
 amount of time and conversation I see you be- 
 stow on Fraulein Schmidt. I can hardly call it
 
 FRAULEIiX SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 293 
 
 impertinence, but there is something indescribable 
 about her manners — an unbecoming freedom, an 
 almost immodest frankness, an almost naked 
 naturalness, that is perilously near impertinence. 
 People of that class do not understand people of 
 ours ; and she will, if you are kinder than is 
 absolutely necessary, certainly take advantage of 
 it. Let me beg you to be careful." 
 
 And Ludwig, beginning then and there, never 
 answered a word. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 What do you think ? Papa's book has been 
 refused by the Jena publisher, by three Berlin 
 publishers, by two in Stuttgart, and one in Leipzig. 
 It is now journeying round Leipzig to the remain- 
 ing publishers. The first time it came back we 
 felt the blow and drooped ; the second time we 
 felt it but did not droop ; the third time we felt 
 nothing ; the fourth time we laughed. 
 
 "Foolish men," chuckled Papa, tickled by 
 such blindness to their own interests, "if none 
 v/ill have it we will translate it and send it to 
 England, what r " 
 
 " Who is wc, darling ? " I asked anxiously. 
 
 " Wc is you, l^ose-Muric," said Papa, pulling 
 my car. 
 
 "Oh," said I. 
 
 Scene closes.
 
 LVII 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec. i. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — It is strange to address 
 this letter to Berlin, and to know that by the 
 time it gets there you will be there too. Well, 
 let it welcome you very heartily back to the 
 Fatherland. I think I know the street you are 
 in ; it is facing the Thiergarten, isn't it, and looks 
 north ? Quite close to the Brandenburg Thor ? 
 1 remember it because we trudged, ^mong other 
 places, also about the Thiergarten on our memor- 
 able visit, and Papa's eye caught the name of your 
 street, and he stood for ten minutes in the rain 
 giving us a spirited sketch of the man's life and 
 claims to have a street called after him. My 
 stepmother waited with a grim patience, her 
 skirts firmly clutched in each hand. She had 
 come to sight-see and to have things explained to 
 her, so that it would be waste of a railway fare not 
 to look and listen. Papa was in great splendour 
 that day, so obviously superior, in the univer- 
 sality of his knowledge, to either of us damp 
 womenfolk. You won't get much sun there 
 unless your rooms are at the back, but, on the 
 
 other hand, it is undoubtedly a street for the 
 
 294.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 295 
 
 exclusive and well-to-do, as even I could see as 
 to whom marble steps and wrought-iron gates 
 convey the usual lesson. I, however, would 
 sooner live in a kennel facing south than in a 
 palace where the sun never came ; but then, as you 
 know, my tendencies are incurably kennelwards. 
 
 To-day I am humble and hanging my head, 
 for I have discovered to my pain and horror that 
 Papa and I are living well beyond our income. 
 I expect we have bought too many books, and 
 spent too much in stamps to be used by publishers ; 
 but it is certain that we've already consumed over 
 seventy pounds of our yearly hundred, and that 
 we only took five months to do it in. What 
 do you think of that ? We have been squander- 
 ing money right and left somehow. There were 
 no clothes to buy, for what we have will last us 
 at least two years, and where it has all gone to 1 
 can't imagine. Indeed, I am a useless person if 
 I cannot even manage a tiny house like this and 
 make such sufficient means do. Papa has written 
 to Professor Martens to tell him he is willing to 
 take in a young man again. Willing ? He is 
 eager, hungry for a young man, for he sees that 
 without one things will go badly with us. And 
 I, remembering the wealth wc enjoyed while Mr. 
 Collins was with us, have written to him to ask if 
 he cares to come back and finish learnino- German. 
 I don't know if he still wants to, or rather if his 
 father still wants him to, for German to Joey was 
 as the fly in the apothecary's ointment, in its 
 extreme ofix'nsiveness, nor have I told Papa that
 
 296 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 I wrote, because of the peculiar horror with which 
 he regards Joey ; but 1 couldn't resist when I 
 know that six months of Joey would deliver us 
 for two whole years from all young men what- 
 ever, and I hope, when the time comes, if it ever 
 does, and Joey with it, to persuade Papa by 
 judicious argument of the eminent desirability of 
 this particular young man. 
 
 There are, however, certain difficulties in the 
 way. Our house has two bedrooms, two sitting- 
 rooms, an attic, a kitchen, and a coal-hole. Johanna 
 inhabits the attic. One sitting-room is sacred to 
 Papa and his work. The other is a scrap-room 
 in which we have our meals and receive Frau von 
 Lindeberg when she calls, and I write letters and 
 read books and darn stockings. Where, then, 
 will Joey sleep ? The answer is as clear as day- 
 light and very startling : Joey must sleep with 
 Papa. Now that this truth has dawned upon me 
 1 spend hours lost in thoughts of things like 
 screens and dividing curtains, besides preparing 
 elaborate speeches for the bringing of Papa to 
 reason. He himself was the first to declare we 
 must positively take in a young man again, and 
 he surely will see, when it is pointed out to him, 
 that any one we have must sleep at the intervals 
 appointed by Nature. I'm afraid he'll see it in 
 the case of every one except the fruitful Joey. It 
 is most unfortunate that Joey should be so foolish 
 about Goethe, for we really do want somebody 
 who doesn't mind about money, and I remember 
 several poor boys in the past who were so very
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 297 
 
 poor that 011 the days when my stepmother 
 demanded payment I used to have to go out 
 early and wander among the hills till evening, 
 unable to endure the sound of the thalers being 
 wrung out of them. Oh, money is the most 
 horrid of all necessities ! I am ashamed to think 
 of the many bright hours of life soiled by 
 anxieties about it, by meannesses about it. 
 Wherever even a question of it arises Love and 
 the Graces fly affrighted, followed closely by the 
 entire troop of equally terrified JVIuses, out of 
 the nearest window. I detest it. I do not want 
 it. But with all my defiance of it I am crushed 
 beneath the yoke of the penny as completely as 
 everybody else. Well do I know that penny, 
 and how much it is when there's one over, and 
 what worlds away when there's one too few. 
 
 Here comes Johanna to lay the dinner. We 
 are rankly vegetarian again, Papa leading the way 
 with immense determination, tor he has set his 
 heart at this unfortunate juncture on a new 
 biography of Goethe that must needs come out 
 just now, a big thing in two volumes costing a 
 terrible number of marks, very well done, full of 
 the result of original digging among archives ; 
 but he dare not buy it, he says, in the present 
 state of our affairs. " Dost thou not think, 
 Rose-Marie," he said, his face in grievous 
 puckers at the prospect, " that a renewed and 
 careful course of herbage may quickly set the 
 matter right ? " 
 
 " Not quickly," said I, shaking my head, and
 
 298 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 pondering privately what, exactly, he meant by 
 the word renewed. 
 
 He looked crestfallen. 
 
 "But ultimately," I said, wishing to cheer 
 him. 
 
 " Ultimately — ultimately," he echoed pee- 
 vishly. " The word has a knell-like sound about 
 it that I do not like. When we have reached 
 thy Ultimately I shall no longer be in a state 
 to desire or appreciate Bielschowsky's Goethe. 
 My brain, by then, will be clothed with grass, 
 and my veins be streams of running water." 
 
 "Well, darling," said I, putting my arm 
 through his, "you'll be at least very nice and 
 refreshing, and extraordinarily like a verse of the 
 Psalms." 
 
 And for two days he has held out undaunted, 
 and here comes our lentil soup and roast apples, 
 so good-bye. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 LVIII 
 
 Galgenbcrg, Dec. 4. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — This morning I woke 
 up and wondered at the strange hush that had 
 fallen on our house, set so near to a sighing, 
 restless forest ; and I looked out of the window 
 and It was the first snow. All night It must have 
 snowed, for there was the most beautiful smooth 
 bank of It without a knob anywhere to show 
 where lately I had been digging, from beneath 
 my window up Into the forest. Each pine tree 
 was a fairy tree, its laden branches one white 
 sparkle. The clouds were gone, and by the time 
 1 had done breakfast there was a brilliant blue 
 sky, and the hills round Jena stood out so sharply 
 against It that they looked as if somebody had 
 been at them with a hatchet. Never was there 
 such a serene and silent world as the one I 
 stepped out Into, shovel In hand. I had come 
 to clear a pathway from the kitchen to the pump ; 
 instead, I stood as silent as everything else, the 
 shovel beneath my arm, gazing about mc and 
 drinking In the purity in a speechless ecstasy. 
 Oh, the air, Mr. Anstruther, the air! Unhappy 
 young man, who did not breathe it. It was like 
 nothing you've got in Berlin, of that you may 
 
 299
 
 300 FRAULEIN SCIIMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 be very certain. It was absolutely calm ; not a 
 breath stirring. It was icy, yet crisp and frappi 
 du soleil. And then how wonderful the world 
 looked after the sodden picture of yesterday still 
 in my mind. Each twig of the orchard trees 
 had its white rim on the one side, exact and 
 smooth, drawn along it by the finger of the 
 north wind. The steps down from the back 
 door had vanished beneath the loveliest, sleekest 
 white covering. The pump, till the day before 
 and ever since I have known it, a bleakly im- 
 pressive object silhouetted in all its lankness and 
 gauntness against a background of sky and 
 mountain, was grown grotesque, bulky, almost 
 playful, its top and long iron handle heaped 
 with an incredible pile of snow, its spout hung 
 about with a beard of icicles. Frau von Linde- 
 berg's kitchen smoke went up straight and pearly 
 into the golden light. The roofs of Jena were 
 in blue shadow. Our neighbour's roof flashed 
 with a million diamonds in the sun. Two rooks 
 cawed to each other from the pine tree nearest 
 our door ; and Rose-Marie Schmidt said her 
 morning prayers then and there, still clinging 
 to her shovel. Then she pulled off her coat, 
 hung her hat on the door-handle, and began in 
 a sort of high rapture to make a pathway to the 
 pump. What are the joys of summer to these ? 
 There is nothing like it, nothing, nothing in the 
 world. I know no mood of Nature's that I do 
 not love — or think I do when it is over — but 
 for keenness of feeling, for stinging pleasure, for
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 301 
 
 overflowing life, give me a winter's day with the 
 first snow, a clear sky, and the thermometer ten 
 degrees Reaumur below zero. 
 
 Vicki called out from her doorway — you 
 could hear the least call this morning at an extra- 
 ordinary distance — to ask if I were snowed up 
 too much to come down as usual. 
 
 " I'm coming down, and I'm making the path 
 to do it with," I called back, shovelling with an 
 energy that set my hair dancing about my ears. 
 
 She shouted back — her very shout was cheer- 
 ful, and 1 did not need to see her face to know 
 that to-day there would be no tears — that she too 
 would make a path up to meet mine ; and 
 presently I heard the sounds of another joyful 
 shovel. 
 
 Underneath, the ground was hard with frost ; 
 it had frozen violently for several hours before 
 the snow came up on the huge purple wings of 
 the north wind. The muddy roads, the soaked 
 forest, the plaintive patter of the rain, were wiped 
 out of existence between a sleeping and a waking. 
 This was no world In which to lament. This 
 was no place in which sighs were possible. The 
 thought that a man's marrying one or not could 
 make so much as the faintest smudge across the 
 bright hopefulness of life made me laugh aloud 
 with healthiest derision. Oh, how my shovel 
 rang against the frozen stones ! The feathery 
 snow was scattered broadcast at each stroke. My 
 body glowed and tingled. My hair grew damp 
 about my forehead. The sun smiled broadly
 
 302 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 down upon my back. Papa flung up his window 
 to cheer me on, but shut it again with a slam 
 before he had well got out his words. Johanna 
 came for an instant to the door, peeped out, 
 gasped that it was cold — unheimlich halt was her 
 strange expression : Uf2/ieim/ic/i = dismal, uncanny ; 
 think of it ! — and shut the door as hurriedly as 
 Papa had shut the window. An hour later two 
 hot and smiling young women met together on 
 the path they had shovelled, and straightened 
 themselves up, and looked proudly at the results 
 of their work, and laughed at each other's scarlet 
 faces and at the way their noses and chins were 
 covered with tiny beads. " As if it were August 
 and we'd been reaping," said Vicki ; and the big 
 girl laughed at this, and the small girl laughed 
 at this, with an excessiveness that would have 
 convinced a passer-by that somebody was being 
 very droll. 
 
 But there was no passer-by. You don't pass 
 by if snow lies on the roads three feet deep. We 
 are cut off entirely from Jena and shops. This 
 letter won't start for I haven't an idea how long. 
 Milk cannot come to us, and we cannot go to 
 where there is a cow. I have flour enough to 
 bake bread with for about ten days unless the 
 Lindebergs should have none, in which case it 
 will last less than five. The coal-hole is stored 
 with cabbages and carrots, buried, with cunning 
 circumvention of decay, in sand. Potatoes abound 
 in earth-covered heaps out of doors. Apples 
 abound in Johanna's attic. We vegetarians come
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 303 
 
 off well on occasions like this, for the absence 
 of milk and butter does not afflict the already 
 sorely afflicted, and of course the absejice of meat 
 leaves us completely cold. 
 
 Vicki and I have been mending a boy's sledge 
 we found in the lumber-room of their house — I 
 suppose the sledge used in his happier days by 
 the Assessor now chained to a desk in Berlin — and 
 with this we are going out after coffee this after- 
 noon when the sky turns pale green and stars 
 come out and blink at us, to the top of the road 
 where it joins the forest, dragging the sledge up 
 as best we can over the frozen snow, and then, 
 tightly clutching each other, and I expect not 
 altogether in silence, we intend to career down 
 again as far as the thing will career, flashing, we 
 hope, past her mother's gate at a speed that will 
 prevent all interference. Perhaps we shall not 
 be able to stop, and will be landed at last in the 
 middle of the market-place in Jena. I'll take 
 this letter with me in case that happens, because 
 then I can post it. Good-bye. It's going to be 
 glorious. Don't you wish you had a sledge and 
 a mountain too .'' 
 
 Yours in a great hurry, 
 
 RosE-MARiii Schmidt.
 
 LIX 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec, 9. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — We are still in sun- 
 shine and frost up here, and are all very happy, 
 we three Schmidts — Johanna is the third — be- 
 cause Joey arrives to-morrow and we shall once 
 more roll in money. 1 hasten to tell you this, 
 for there were signs in your last two letters that 
 you were taking our position to heart. It is 
 wonderfully kind, I think, the way you are in- 
 terested in our different little pains and pleasures. 
 I am often more touched than I care to tell you 
 by the sincerity of your sympathy with all we 
 do, and feel very grateful for so true a friend. 
 I was so glad you gave up coming to Jena on 
 your way to Berlin, for it showed that you try 
 to be reasonable, and then you know Professor 
 Martens goes to Berlin himself every now and 
 then to take sweet counsel with men like Har- 
 nack, so you will be sure to see him sooner or 
 later, and see him comfortably, without a rush to 
 catch a train. You say you did not come because 
 I urged you not to, and that in all things you 
 want to please me. Well, I would prefer to 
 suppose you a follower of that plain-faced but 
 excellent guide. Common Sense. Still, being 
 
 3-4
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 305 
 
 human, the less lofty and conscientious side of 
 me does like to know there is some one who 
 wishes to please me. I feel deliciously flattered 
 — when I let myself think of it ; nearly always 
 I take care to think of something else — that a 
 young man of your undoubted temporal and 
 spiritual advantages should be desirous of pleasing 
 an obscure person like me. What would Frau 
 von Lindeberg say ? Do you remember Shelley's 
 wife's sister, the Miss Westbrook who brushed 
 her hair so much, with her constant " Gracious 
 Heavens, what would Miss Warne say ? " I feel 
 inclined to exclaim the same thing about Frau 
 von Lindeberg, but with an opposite meaning. 
 And it is really very surprising that you should 
 be so kind, for I have been a shrew to you often, 
 and have been absorbed in my own affairs, and 
 have not erred on the side of over-sympathy 
 about yours. Some day, when we are both very 
 old, perhaps you will get a few hours' leave from 
 the dowager duchess you'll marry when you are 
 forty, and will come and look at my pigs and my 
 garden, and sit with nic before the fire and talk 
 over our long friendship and all the long days 
 of our life. And I, when 1 hear you are coming, 
 shall be in a flutter, and will get out my best 
 dress, and will iuss over things like asparagus 
 and a salad, and tell the heated and awe-stricken 
 maid that His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador 
 at the Best Place to be an Ambassador in in the 
 World is coming to supper ; and we shall feel 
 how sweet it is to be old dear friends. 
 
 X
 
 3o6 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Meanwhile we are both very busy with the 
 days we have got to now. To-day, for instance, 
 has been so violently active that every bone I 
 possess is aching. I'll tell you what happened, 
 since you so earnestly assure me that all we do 
 interests you. The snow is frozen so hard that 
 far from being cut off as I had feared from shops 
 and food, there is the most glorious sledging road 
 down to Jena ; and at once, on hearing of Joey's 
 imminence, Vicki and I coasted down on the 
 sledge, and I bought the book Papa has been 
 wanting and a gigantic piece of beef. Then we 
 persuaded a small but strong boy, a boy of open 
 countenance and superior manners whom we met 
 in the market-place, to drag the sledge with the 
 beef and the book up the hill again for us ; and 
 so we set out homewards, walking gaily one on 
 each side of him, encouraging him with loud 
 admiration of his prowess. " See," said I, when 
 I knew a specially steep bit was coming, " see 
 what a great thing it is to be able to draw so 
 much so easily." 
 
 A smirk and renewed efforts were the result 
 of this speech at first ; but the smirk grew 
 smaller as the hill grew steeper, and the efforts 
 dwindled to vanishing point with the higher 
 windings of the road. At last there was no 
 smirk at all, and at my sixth repetition of the 
 encouragement he stopped dead. "If it is such 
 a great thing," he said, wiping his youthful 
 forehead with a patched sleeve, and looking 
 at me with a precociousness I had not till then
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 307 
 
 observed in his eyes, " why do you not do it 
 yourself? " 
 
 Vicki and I stared at each other in silent 
 wonder. 
 
 "Because," I said, turning a reproachful gaze on 
 him, " because, my dear little boy, I desire you to 
 have the chance of earning the fifty pfennings we 
 have promised to give you when we get to the top." 
 
 He began to pull again, but no longer with 
 any pride in his performance. Vicki and I walked 
 in silence behind, and at the next steep bit, instead 
 of repeating a form of words I felt had grown 
 vain, I skilfully unhooked the parcel of meat 
 hanging on the right-hand runner and carried it, 
 and Vicki, always quick to follow my example, 
 unhooked the biography of Goethe from the left- 
 hand runner and carried that. The sledge leaped 
 forward, and for a space the boy climbed with 
 greater vigour. Then came another long steep 
 bit, and he flagged again. 
 
 " Come, come," said I, " it is quite easy." 
 
 He at once stopped and wiped his forehead. 
 " If it is easy," he asked, " why do you not do it 
 yourself ? " 
 
 " Because, my dear little boy," said I, trying to 
 be patient, but meat is heavy, and I knew it to be 
 raw, and I feared every moment to feel a dreadful 
 dampness oozing through the paper, and I was 
 out of breath, and no longer completely calm, 
 "you engaged to pull it up for us, and havinnj 
 engaged to do it, it is your duty to do it. 1 will 
 not come between a boy and his duty."
 
 3o8 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 The boy looked at Vicki. " How she talks," 
 he said. 
 
 Vicki and I again stared at each other in silent 
 wonder, and while we were staring he pulled the 
 sledge sideways across the road and sat down. 
 
 " Come, come," said I, striving after a brisk 
 severity. 
 
 " 1 am tired," he said, leaning his chin on his 
 hand and studying first my face and then Vicki's 
 with a detached, impartial scrutiny. 
 
 "We too are tired," said I, "and see, yet we 
 carry the heavy parcels for you. The sledge, 
 empty, is quite light." 
 
 "Then why do you not pull it yourself?" he 
 asked again. 
 
 " Anyhow," said Vicki, " while he sits there 
 we needn't hold these great things." And she put 
 the volumes on the sledge, and I let the meat drop 
 on it, which it did with a horrible, soft, heavy thud. 
 
 The boy sat motionless. 
 
 "Let him get his wind," said Vicki, turning 
 away to look over the edge of the road at the 
 view. 
 
 " I'm afraid he's a bad little boy," said I, 
 following her and gazing too at the sparkling hills 
 across the valley. " A bad little boy, encased in 
 an outer semblance of innocence." 
 
 " He only wants his wind," said Vicki. 
 
 " He shows no symptoms of not having got 
 it," said I ; for the boy was very calm, and his 
 mouth was shut sweetly in a placid curve. 
 
 We waited, looking at the view, humanely
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 309 
 
 patient as became two highly civilized persons. The 
 
 boy got up after a few minutes and shook himself. 
 
 " I am rested," he announced, with a sudden 
 
 return to the politeness that had charmed us in 
 
 " It certainly was rather a long pull up," said 
 I, kindly, softened by his manner. 
 
 " Yes," said he, " but I will not keep the 
 ladies waiting longer." 
 
 And he did not, for he whisked the sledge 
 round, sat himself upon it, and before we had in 
 the least understood what was happening, he and 
 it and the books for Papa and the beef for Joey 
 were darting down the hill, skimming along the 
 track with the delicious swiftness none knew and 
 appreciated better than we did. At the bend of 
 the road he gave a joyful whoop and waved 
 his cap. Then he disappeared. 
 
 Vicki and I stared at each other once more in 
 silent wonder. 
 
 " What an abandoned little boy," she gasped 
 at last — he must have been almost in Jena by the 
 time we were able to speak. 
 
 " The poor beef," said I, very ruefully, for it 
 was a big piece and had cost vast sums. 
 
 " Yes, and the books," said Vicki. 
 
 " Yes, and the ylsscssors sledge," said I. 
 
 There was nothing for it but to hurry down 
 after him and seek out the authorities and set 
 them ill pursuit ; and so we hurried as much as 
 can be hurried over such a road, tired, silent, and 
 hungry, and both secretly nettled to the point of
 
 310 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 madness at having been so easily circumvented 
 by one small boy. 
 
 " Little boys are more pestilential than almost 
 anything I know," said Vicki, after a period of 
 speechless crunching over the snow. 
 
 "Far more than anything I know," said I. 
 
 " I'm thankful I did not marry," said she. 
 
 " So am I," said I. 
 
 "The world's much too full of them as It is/* 
 said she. 
 
 " Much," said I. 
 
 " Oh," she cried suddenly, stamping her foot, 
 "if I could only get hold of him — wicked, wicked 
 little wretch 1 " 
 
 " What would you do .? " I asked, curious to 
 see if her plans were at all like mine. 
 
 " Gr — r — r — r — r," said Vicki, clenching all 
 those parts of her, such as teeth and fists, that 
 would clench. 
 
 " Oh, so would I ! " I cried. 
 
 We were almost at the bottom ; the road was 
 making its final bend ; and, as we turned the 
 corner, behold the boy, his cap off, his head bent, 
 his shoulders straining at the rope, pulling the 
 sledge laboriously up again. And there was the 
 beef hung on one runner, and there were 
 the books hung on the other. We both stopped 
 dead, arrested by this spectacle. He was almost 
 upon us before he saw us, so intent was he on his 
 business, his eyes on the ground, the sun shining 
 on his yellow hair, the drops of labour rolling 
 down his crimson cheeks.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 311 
 
 " What ? " he panted, pausing when he saw 
 our four boots in a row in his path, and had 
 looked up and recognized the rest of us, " what, 
 am I there already ? " 
 
 "No," I cried, in the voice of justified anger, 
 " you are not there — you are here, at the very 
 beginning of the mountain. Now, what have you 
 to say for yourself ? " 
 
 " Nothing," said he, grinning and wiping 
 his face with his sleeve. "But it was a good 
 ride." 
 
 " You have only just escaped the police and 
 prison," I said, still louder. "We were on our 
 way to hand you over to them." 
 
 " If I had been there to hand," said he, wink- 
 ing at Vicki, to whom he had apparently taken a 
 fancy that was in no way encouraged. 
 
 " You had stolen our sledge and our parcels," 
 I continued, glaring down on him. 
 
 " Here they are. They are all here. What 
 more do you want ? " said he. " How she talks," 
 he added, turning to Vicki and thrusting out his 
 underlip with an expression that could only mean 
 disgust. 
 
 " You are a very naughty little boy," said 
 Vicki. " Give me the rope and be off." 
 
 " Give mc my fifty pfennings." 
 
 "Your fifty pfennings.?" we exclaimed with 
 one voice. 
 
 "You promised me fifty pfennings." 
 
 " To pull the sledge up to the top." 
 
 " 1 am ready to do it."
 
 312 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Thank you. Wc have had enough. Let 
 the rope go " 
 
 " And get home to your mother '* 
 
 "And ask her to give you a thorough " 
 
 '* A bargain is a bargain," said the boy, plant- 
 ing himself squarely in front of me, while I 
 adjusted the rope over my shoulders and prepared 
 to pull. 
 
 " Now, run away, you very naughty little 
 boy," said I, pulling sideways to pass him by. 
 
 He stepped aside too, and faced me again. 
 
 " You promised me fifty pfennings," he said. 
 
 " To pull the sledge up." 
 
 " I am willing to do it." 
 
 " Yes, and coast down again as soon as you 
 have got to the top. Be off with you. We are 
 not playing games." 
 
 " A promise is a promise," said the boy. 
 
 " Vicki, remove him from my path," said I. 
 
 Vicki took him by the arm and gingerly drew 
 him on one side, and I started up the hill, sur- 
 prised to find what hard work it was. 
 
 " I am coming too," said the boy. 
 
 " Are you ? " said Vicki. 
 
 " Yes. To fetch my fifty pfennings." 
 
 We said no more. I couldn't, because I was 
 so breathlessly pulling, and Vicki marched by 
 my side in indignant silence, with a jealous eye 
 divided between the parcels and the boy. He, 
 unencumbered, thrust his hands into his pockets 
 and beguiled the way by shrilly whistling. 
 
 At each winding of the road when Vicki and
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 313 
 
 I changed places he renewed his offer to fulfil his 
 first bargain ; but we, more and more angry as 
 we grew hotter and hotter, refused with an ever- 
 increasing wrath. 
 
 "Come, come," said he, when a very steep 
 bit had forced me to pause and struggle for 
 
 breath, " come, come " and he imitated my 
 
 earlier manner — " it is quite easy." 
 
 I looked at him with what of majesty I could, 
 and answered not a word. 
 
 At Vicki's gate he was still with us. " I will 
 see you safely home," Vicki said to me when we 
 got there. 
 
 " This where you live ? " inquired the boy, 
 peeping through the bars of the gate with cheerful 
 interest. " Nice little house." 
 
 We were silent. 
 
 " I will see her home," he said to Vicki, " if 
 you don't want to. But she can surely take care 
 of herself, a great girl like that ? " 
 
 We were silent. 
 
 At my gate he was still with us. " This 
 where she lives ? " he asked Vicki, again peeping 
 through the bars witfi cheerful interest. " Funny 
 little house." 
 
 We were silent. In silence we opened the 
 gate and dragged the sledge in. He came too. 
 
 " You cannot come in here," suid Vicki. 
 "This is private property." 
 
 " I only wish to fetch my fifty pfennings," 
 said he. " It will save you trouble if I come to 
 the door."
 
 314 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Wc went in in silence, and together carried 
 the sledge inside, a thing we had not yet done, 
 and took it with immense exertions into the 
 parlour, and put it under the table, and tied it by- 
 each of its four corners to each of the table's 
 four Ie2;S. 
 
 " There," said Vicki, scrambling to her feet 
 again, and looking at her knots with satisfaction, 
 *' that's safe if anything is." 
 
 I went with her to the door. The boy was 
 still there, cap in hand, very polite, very patient. 
 
 " And my fifty pfennings ? " he asked 
 pleasantly. 
 
 I cannot explain what we did next. I pulled 
 out my purse and paid him, which was surprising 
 enough, but Vicki, to whom fifty pfennings are 
 also precious, pulled out hers too and gave him 
 fifty on her own account. I am quite unable to 
 explain either her action or mine. The boy made 
 us each the politest bow, his cap sweeping the 
 snow. 
 
 " She," he said to Vicki, jerking his head my 
 way, " may think she is the prettiest, but you are 
 certainly the best." 
 
 And he left us to settle It between us, and 
 walked away shrilly whistling. 
 
 And I am so tired that my very pen has 
 begun to ache, so good-bye. 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 Oh, I must tell you that Papa refused to have 
 Joey sleep in his room with a flatness that put a
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 315 
 
 stop to my arguments before they were even 
 begun. "Nay," he cried, "I will not." And 
 when I opened my mouth to produce the argu- 
 ments — " Nay," he cried again, " I will not." 
 He drowned my speech. He would not listen. 
 He would not reason. Parrot-like through the 
 house resounded his cry — " Nay, I will not." 
 I was in despair. But everything has arranged 
 itself. Joey is to have the Assessor s room on the 
 ground-floor of our neighbour's house, and will 
 come up here for lessons and meals. He is only 
 to sleep down there, and will be all day here. 
 We telegraphed to Weimar to ask about it, and 
 the ever kind owner immediately agreed. Frau 
 von Lindeberg is displeased, for she says no 
 Dammerlitz has ever yet been known to live in a 
 house where there was a lodger — a common 
 lodger she said first, but corrected herself, and 
 covered up the common with a cough.
 
 LX 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec. 12. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstrutiier, — I must write to-night, 
 though it is late, to tell you of my speechless 
 surprise when I came in an hour ago and found 
 you had been here. I knew you had the moment 
 I came in. At once I recognized the smell of the 
 cigarettes you smoke. I went upstairs and called 
 Johanna, for 1 was not sure that you were not 
 still here, in the parlour, and frankly 1 was not 
 going down if you were, for I do not choose to 
 have my fastnesses stormed. She told me of 
 your visit ; how you had come up on foot soon 
 after Vicki and Joey and I had started off for an 
 afternoon's tobogganing on the hills, how you 
 had stayed talking to Papa, and talking and talk- 
 ing, till you had to hurry down to catch the last 
 train. " And he bade me greet you for him," 
 finished Johanna. " Indeed ? " said I. 
 
 Do you like winter excursions into the 
 country ? Is Berlin boring you already ? I 
 shook my head in grave disapproval as Johanna 
 proceeded with her tale. I am all for a young 
 man's attending to his business and not making 
 
 sudden wild journeys that take him away for a 
 
 316
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 317 
 
 whole day and most of a night. Papa was de- 
 lighted, I must say, to have had at last, as he told 
 me with disconcerting warmth, at last after all 
 these months, an intelligent conversation; but with 
 his delight the success of your visit ends, for 
 when I heard of it I was not delighted at all. 
 Why did you go into the kitchen ? Johanna says 
 you would go, and then that you went out hatless 
 at the back door and down to the bottom of the 
 garden, and that you stood there leaning against 
 the fence as though it were summer. " Still 
 without a hat," said Johanna, in her turn shaking 
 her head, " l^ei dieser Kaltey 
 
 Bet dieser Kulte^ indeed. Yes ; what made 
 you do it ? 1 am glad I was out, for I do not 
 care to look on while the usually reasonable 
 behave unaccountably. I don't think I can be 
 friends with you for a little after this. 1 think 
 I really must quarrel, for it isn't very decent 
 to drop unexpectedly upon a person who from 
 time to time has told you, with the frankness that 
 is her most marked feature, that she doesn't want 
 to be dropped upon. No doubt you wished to 
 see Papa as well, and, on your way through Jena, 
 Professor Martens ; but I will not pretend to 
 suppose your call was not chiefly intended for me, 
 for it is to me and not to either of those wiser 
 ones that you have written every day for months 
 past. You are a strange young man. Heaven 
 knows what you have accustomed yourself to 
 imagining me to be. I almost wish now that you 
 had seen me when I came in from our violent
 
 3i8 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 exercise, a touzlcd, short-skirted, heated person. 
 It might have cured you. I forgot to look in the 
 glass, but of course my hair and eyelashes were as 
 white with hoar-frost as Vicki's and Joey's, and 
 from beneath them and from above my turned-up 
 collar must have emerged just such another glow- 
 ing nose. Even Papa was struck by my appear- 
 ance — after having gazed, I suppose, for hours on 
 your composed correctness — and remarked that 
 living in the country did not necessarily mean a 
 complete return to savage nature. 
 
 The house feels very odd to-night. So do I. 
 It feels haunted. So do 1. 1 want to scold you, 
 and yet I cannot. I have the strangest desire to 
 cry. It is the thought that you came this long 
 way, toiled up this long hill, waited those long 
 hours, all to see some one who is glad to have 
 missed you, that makes me want to. The night 
 is so black outside my window, and somewhere 
 through that blackness you are travelling at this 
 moment, disappointed, across the endless frozen 
 fields and forests that you must go through inch 
 by inch before you reach Berhn. Why did you 
 do a thing so comfortless ^ And here have I 
 actually begun to cry — I think because it is so 
 dark, and you are not yet home. 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 LXI 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec. 16. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — 1 don't quite under- 
 stand. Purely motherly, I should say. Perhaps 
 our notions of the exact meaning of the word 
 "friend" are different. 1 include in it a motherly 
 and sisterly interest in bodily well-being, in dry 
 socks, warm feet, regular meals. I do not like 
 my friend to be out on a bitter night, to take a 
 tiring journey, to be disappointed. My friend's 
 mother would have, I imagine, precisely the same 
 feeling. My friend should not, then, mistake 
 mere motherliness for other and less comfortable 
 sentiments. But I am busy to-day, and have no 
 time to puzzle out your letter. It must have 
 been the outcome of a rather strange mood. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 Tell me more about your daily life in Berlin, 
 the people you see, the houses you go to, the 
 attitude, kind or otherwise, of your chief. Tell 
 me these things, instead of swamping me with 
 subtleties of sentiment. I don't understand 
 subdeties, and I fear and despise sentiment as a 
 
 3'9
 
 320 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 certain spoiler of plain bread-and-butter happiness. 
 There should be no sentiment between friends. 
 The moment there is they leave off being just 
 friends ; and is not that what we both most want 
 to be ?
 
 LXII 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec. 19. 
 
 Oh, I can do nothing with you ! You are bent, 
 I'm afraid, on losing your friend. Don't write 
 me such letters — don't, don't, don't ! My heart 
 sinks when I see you deliberately setting about 
 strangling our friendship. Am I to lose it, then, 
 that too .'' Your last letters are like bad dreams, 
 so strange and unreasonable, so without the least 
 order or self-control. I read them with my 
 fingers in my ears — an instinctive foolish move- 
 ment of protection against words I do not want 
 to hear. Dear friend, do not take your friendship 
 from me. Give yourself a shake ; come out from 
 those vain imaginings your soul has gone to dwell 
 among. What shall I talk to you about this 
 bright winter's morning ? Yes, 1 will write you 
 longer letters ; you needn't beg so hard, as though 
 the stars couldn't get along in their courses if I 
 didn't. See, I am willing to do anything to keep 
 my friend. You are my only one, the only person 
 in the world to whom I tell the silly thoughts 
 that come into my head and so get rid of them. 
 You listen, and you arc the only person in the 
 world who does. You help me, and I in my
 
 322 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 turn want to be allowed to go on helping you. 
 Do not put an end to what is precious — believe 
 me, it will grow more and more precious with 
 years. Do not, in the heat and impatience of 
 youth, kill the poor goose who, if left alone, will 
 lay the most beautiful golden eggs. "What shall 
 I talk to you about to turn your attention some- 
 where else, somewhere far removed from that 
 unhappy bird ? Shall I tell you about Papa's 
 book, finally refused by every single publisher, 
 come back battered and draggled to be galvanized 
 by me into fresh life in an English translation ? 
 Shall I tell you how I sit for three hours daily 
 doing it, pen in hand, ink on fingers, hair pushed 
 back from an anxious brow. Papa hovering behind 
 with a dictionary in which, full of distrust, he 
 searches as I write to see if it contains the words 
 I have used .'' Shall I tell you about Joey, whose 
 first disgust at finding himself once more with us 
 has given place by degrees that grow visibly wider 
 to a rollicking enjoyment ? Less and less does 
 he come up here. More and more does he stay 
 down there. He hurries through his lessons with 
 a speed that leaves Papa speechless, and is off 
 and hauling the sledge up past our gate with Vicki 
 walking demurely beside him, and is whizzing 
 down again past our gate with Vicki sitting 
 demurely in front of him, before Papa is well 
 through the list of adjectives he applies to him 
 once at least every day. I never see the sledge 
 now nearer than in the distance. Vicki wears 
 her stiff shirts again, and her neat ties again, and
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 323 
 
 the sporting belt that makes her waist look so 
 very trim and tiny. If anything she is more 
 aggressively starched and boyish than before. 
 Her collars seem to grow higher and cleaner each 
 time I see her. Her hat is tilted further forward. 
 Her short skirts show the neatest little boots. 
 She is extraordinarily demure. She never cries. 
 Joey reads Samson Agonistes with us, and points 
 out the jokes to Vicki. Vicki says why did I 
 never tell her it was so funny } I stare first at 
 one and then at the other, and feel a hundred 
 years old. 
 
 " I say," said Joey, coming into the kitchen 
 just now. 
 
 "Well, what?" said I. 
 
 " I'm going to Berlin for a day." 
 
 " Are you indeed ? " 
 
 " Tell the old man, will you ? " 
 
 " Tell the who .? " 
 
 "The old man. I shan't be here for the 
 lesson to-morrow, thank the Lord. I'm off by 
 the first train." 
 
 " Indeed," said I. 
 
 There was a silence, during which Joey fidgeted 
 about among the culinary objects scattered around 
 him. I went on peeling apples. When he had 
 fidgeted as much as he wanted to he lit a cigarette. 
 
 "No," said I. "Not in kitchens. A highly 
 improper thing to do." 
 
 He threw it into the dustbin. " I say," he 
 gaid again. 
 
 " Well, what ?" said I, again.
 
 324 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 "What do you think — what do you think " 
 
 He paused. I waited. As he didn't go on 
 ] thought he had done. 
 
 « What do I think .? " I said. " You'd be 
 staggered if I told you, it's such a lot, and it's so 
 terrific." 
 
 "What do you think," repeated Joey, taking 
 no heed of me, but, with his hands in his pockets, 
 kicking a fallen apple aimlessly about on the floor, 
 " what do you think the little girl'd like for 
 Christmas and that, don't you know .'' " 
 
 I stopped peeling and gazed at him, knife 
 and apple suspended in mid-air. 
 
 " The little girl .? " I inquired. " Do you 
 mean Johanna .'' " 
 
 Joey stared. Then he grinned at me 
 monstrously. 
 
 " You bet," was his cryptic reply. 
 
 " What am I to bet ? " I asked patiently. 
 
 Joey gave the fallen apple a kick. Looking 
 down, I observed that it was the biggest and the 
 best, and stooped to rescue it. 
 
 "It's not pretty," said I, rebuking him, " to 
 kick even an apple when it's down." 
 
 " Oh, I say," said Joey, impatiently, " do be 
 sensible. There never was any gettin' much 
 sense out of you, I remember. And you're only 
 pretendin'. You know I mean Vicki." 
 
 "Vicki?" 
 
 He had the grace to blush. " Well, Fr^ulein 
 What's her name. You can't expect any one 
 decent to get the hang of these names of yours.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 325 
 
 They ain't got any hang, so how's one to get it ? 
 What'd she like for Christmas ? Don't you all 
 kick up a mighty fuss here over Christmas ? 
 Trees and presents and that ? Plummier plum- 
 pudding than we have, and mincier mince-pies; 
 what ? " 
 
 " If you think you will get even one plum- 
 pudding or mince-pie," said I, thoughtfully 
 peeling, " you are gravely mistaken. The 
 national dish is carp boiled in beer." 
 
 Joey looked really revolted. " What ? " he 
 cried, not liking to credit his senses. 
 
 " Carp boiled in beer," I repeated distinctly. 
 " It is what I'm going to give you on Christmas 
 Day." 
 
 " No, you're not," he said hastily. 
 
 " Yes, I am," I insisted. " And before it and 
 after it you will be required, in accordance with 
 German custom, to sing chorales." 
 
 " I'd like to see myself doin' it. You'll have 
 to sing 'em alone. I'm invited to feed down 
 there." 
 
 And he jerked his head towards that portion 
 of the kitchen wall beyond which, if you passed 
 through it and the intervening coal-hole and 
 garden and orchard, you would come to the 
 dwelling of the Lindebergs. 
 
 " Oh," said I ; and looked at him thought- 
 fully. 
 
 " Yes," said he, trying to meet my look with 
 an equal calm, but conspicuously fuiHiig. "That 
 bcin' so," he went on hurriedly, " and my
 
 326 FRAULKIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 droppln', so to speak, into the middle of some- 
 body's Christmas tree and that, it seems to me 
 only decent to give the little girl somethin'. What 
 shall I get her ? Somethin' to put on, I suppose. 
 A brooch, or a pin, what ? " 
 
 "Or a ring," said I, thoughtfully peeling. 
 
 " A ring ? What, can one — oh, I say, don't 
 let's waste time rottin' " 
 
 And glancing up through cautious eyelashes 
 I saw he was very red. 
 
 " It'd be easy enough if it was you," he said 
 revengefully. 
 
 "What would ?" 
 
 " Hittin' on what you'd like." 
 
 « Would it ! " 
 
 " All you'd want to do the trick would be a 
 dictionary." 
 
 " Now, Mr. Collins, that's unkind," said I, 
 laying down my knife. 
 
 He began to grin again. " It's true," he 
 insisted. 
 
 " It suggests such an immeasurable stuffiness," 
 I complained. 
 
 " It isn't my fault," said he, grinning. 
 
 " But perhaps I deserve it because I mentioned 
 a ring. Let me tell you, as man to man, that 
 you must buy no brooches for Vicki." 
 
 « A pin, then ? " 
 
 " No pins." 
 
 "A necklace, then ?" 
 
 "Nothing of the sort. What would her 
 parents say ? Give her chocolates, a bunch of
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 327 
 
 roses, perhaps a book — but nothing more. If 
 you do you'll get Into a nice scrape." 
 
 Joey looked at me. " What sort of scrape ? " 
 he asked curiously. 
 
 *' Gracious heavens, don't you see ? Are 
 you such a supreme goose ? My poor young 
 man, the parents would immediately ask you 
 your intentions." 
 
 " Oh, would they ? " said Joey, in his turn 
 becoming thoughtful ; and after a moment he 
 said again, " Oh, would they ^ " 
 
 " It's as certain as anything I know," said I. 
 
 *' Oh, is it } " said Joey, still thoughtful. 
 
 " It's a catastrophe young men very properly 
 dread," said I. 
 
 " Oh, do they .'' " said Joey, sunk in thought. 
 
 " Well, if you're not listening " And I 
 
 shrugged my shoulders, and went on with my 
 peeling. 
 
 He pulled his cap out of the pocket Into 
 which it had been stuffed, and began to put it on, 
 tugging It first over one ear and then over the 
 other In a deep abstraction. 
 
 " You're in my kitchen," I observed. 
 
 " Sorry," he said, snatching it off. " I forgot. 
 You always make mc feel as if I were out of 
 doors." 
 
 "How very odd," said I, interested and 
 slightly flattered. 
 
 " Ain't It. East wind, you know — decidedly 
 breezy, not to say nippin'. W\-ll, I must be goin'." 
 
 '' I think so too," said I, coldly.
 
 328 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Don't be dull while I'm away," said Joey ; 
 and departed with a nod. 
 
 But he put in his head again the next moment. 
 " I say, Miss Schmidt " 
 
 " Well, what ? " 
 
 "You think I ought to stick to chocolates, 
 then ? " 
 
 " If you don't there'll be extraordinary 
 complications," said I. 
 
 " You're sure of that ? " 
 
 " Positive." 
 
 " You'd swear it? " 
 
 I threw down my knife and apple. " Now, 
 what's the matter with the boy 1 " I exclaimed 
 impatiently. " Do I ever swear ? " 
 
 " But if you did you would ? " 
 
 " Swear what ? " 
 
 " That a bit of jewellery would bring the 
 complications about ? " 
 
 " Oh — dense, dense, dense 1 Of course it 
 would. You'd be surprised at the number and 
 size of them. You can't be too careful. Give 
 her a hymn-book." 
 
 Joey gave a loud whoop. 
 
 " Well, it's safe," said I, severely, " and it 
 appeals to parents." 
 
 " You bet," said Joey, screwing his face into 
 a limitlessly audacious wink. 
 
 " 1 wish," said I, very plaintively, " that I 
 knew exactly what it is 1 am to bet. You con- 
 stantly tell me to do so, but never add the 
 necessary directions."
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 329 
 
 "Oh, I'm goinV' was Joey's irrelevant reply ; 
 and his head popped out as suddenly as it had 
 popped in. 
 
 Or shall I tell you — I am anxious to make 
 this letter long enough to please you — about 
 Frau von Lindeberg, who spent two days 
 elaborately cutting Joey, the two first days of his 
 appearance in their house as lodger, persuaded, I 
 suppose, that no one even remotely and by 
 business connected with the Schmidts could be 
 anything but undesirable, and how, meeting him 
 in the passage, or on his way through the garden 
 to us, the iciest stare was all she felt justified in 
 giving him in return for his friendly grin, and 
 how on the third day she suddenly melted, and 
 stopped and spoke pleasantly to the poor solitary, 
 commiserating with his situation as a stranger in 
 a foreign country, and suggesting the alleviation 
 to his loneliness of frequent visits to them ? No 
 one knows the first cause of this melting. I 
 think she must have heard through her servant 
 of the number and texture of those pink and blue 
 silk handkerchiefs, of his amazing piles of new 
 and costly shirts, of the obvious solidity of the 
 silver on everything of his that has a back or a 
 stopper or a handle or a knob. Anyhow, on that 
 third morning she came up and called on us, 
 asking particularly for Papa. 
 
 " I particularly wished," she said to me, 
 spreading herself out as she did the last time on 
 the sofa, " to see your good father on a matter of 
 some importance."
 
 330 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " I'll go and call him," said I, concealing my 
 conviction that though I might call he would not 
 come. 
 
 And he would not. " What, interrupt my 
 work ? " he cried. "Is the woman mad ? " 
 
 I went back and made excuses. They were 
 very lame ones, and Frau von Lindeberg instantly 
 brushed them aside. 
 
 " I will go to him," she said, getting up. " Your 
 excellent father will' not refuse me, I am sure." 
 
 Papa was sitting in his slippers before the stove, 
 doing nothing, as far as I could see, except very 
 comfortably reading the new book about Goethe. 
 
 " I am sorry to disturb so busy a man," said 
 Frau von Lindeberg, bearing down with smiles 
 on this picture of peace. 
 
 Papa sprang up, and, seeing there was no 
 escape, pretended to be quite pleased to see her. 
 He offered her his chair, he prayed for indulgence 
 towards his slippers, and, sitting down facing her, 
 inquired in what way he could be of service. 
 
 "I want to know something about the young 
 Englishman who occupies a room in our house," 
 said Frau von Lindeberg, without losing time. 
 " You understand that it is not only natural but 
 incumbent on a parent to wish for information in 
 regard to a person dwelling under the same roof." 
 
 "I can give every information," said Papa, 
 readily. " His name in English is Collins. In 
 German it is Esel^ 
 
 " Oh, really 1" said Frau von Lindeberg, taken 
 aback.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 331 
 
 " It is, madam," said Papa, looking very- 
 pleasant, as became a man in his own house con- 
 fronted by a female visitor. " We have re- 
 christened him. And no array of words with which 
 I am acquainted will express the exactness of his 
 resemblance to that useful but unintellio-ent beast." 
 
 " Oh, really ! " said Frau von Lindeberg, not 
 yet recovered. 
 
 " The ass, madam, is conspicuous for the 
 narrowness of its understanding. So is Mr. 
 Collins. The ass is exasperating to persons of 
 normal brains. So is Mr. Collins. The ass is 
 lazy in regard to work, and obstinate. So is 
 Mr. Collins. The ass is totally indifferent to 
 study. So is Mr. Collins. The ass has never 
 heard of Goethe. Neither has Mr. Collins. The 
 ass is useful to the poor. So is Mr. Collins. 
 The ass, indeed, is the poor man's most precious 
 possession. So, emphatically, is Mr. Collins." 
 
 " Oh, really!" said Frau von Lindeberg again. 
 
 " Is there anything more you wish to know ? " 
 Papa inquired politely, for she seemed unable 
 immediately to go on. 
 
 She cleared her throat. " In what way — in 
 what way is he useful ? " she asked. 
 
 " Madam, he pays." 
 
 "Yes — of course, of course. You cannot" — 
 she smiled — " be expected to teach him German 
 for nothing." 
 
 "Far from doing that, I teach him German 
 for a good deal." 
 
 " Is he — do you know anything about his
 
 332 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 relations ? You understand," she added, " that 
 
 it is not altogether pleasant for a private family 
 
 like ours to have a strange young man living 
 
 under the same roof." 
 
 " Understand ? " cried Papa. " I understand 
 
 it so thoroughly that 1 most positively refused to 
 
 have him under this one." 
 
 "Ah — yes," said Frau von Lindeberg, a 
 
 Dammerlitz expression coming into her face. 
 
 " The cases are not — are not quite — pray tell me, 
 
 who and what is his father .? " 
 
 "A respectable man, madam, I should judge." 
 " Respectable ? And besides respectable ? " 
 " Eminently worthy, I should say, from his 
 
 letters." 
 
 " Ah yes. And — and anything else ? " 
 
 " Honourable too, I fancy. Indeed, 1 have 
 
 not a doubt." 
 
 " Is he of any family ? " 
 
 " He is of his own family, madam." 
 
 " Ah yes. And did you — did you say he was 
 
 well off.?" 
 
 " He is apparently revoltingly rich." 
 
 An electric shock seemed to make Frau von 
 
 Lindeberg catch her breath. 
 
 " Oh, really," she then said evenly. " Did he 
 
 inherit his wealth .? " 
 
 " Made it, madam. He is an ironmonger." 
 Another electric shock made Frau von Linde- 
 berg catch her breath again. Then she again 
 
 said — " Oh, really ! " 
 There was a pause.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 333 
 
 " England," she said, after a moment, " is 
 different from Germany." 
 
 " I believe it is," admitted Papa. 
 
 " And ironmongers there may be different 
 from ironmongers here." 
 
 " It is at least conceivable." 
 
 *' Tell me, what status has an ironmonger in 
 England ? " 
 
 « What status .? " 
 
 "In society." 
 
 "Ah, that I know not. I went over there 
 seven and twenty years ago for the purpose of 
 marrying, and I met no ironmongers. Not 
 consciously, that is." 
 
 *' Would they — would they be above the set 
 in which you then found yourself, or would 
 
 they " she tried to conceal a shiver — " be 
 
 below it ? " 
 
 " I know not. I know nothing of society 
 either there or here. But I do know that money, 
 there as here, is very mighty. It is, I should say, 
 merely a question of having enough." 
 
 "And has he enough ^" 
 
 "The man, madam, is, I believe, perilously 
 near becoming that miserable and isolated creature 
 a milHonairc. God help the unfortunate Joey." 
 
 " But why ? Why should God help him ? 
 Why is he unfortunate ^ Docs not he get any 
 share .'' " 
 
 "Any share.'' He gets it all. lie is the 
 only child. Now, I put it to you, what chance is 
 there for an unhappy youth with no brains "
 
 33+ FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 " Oh, I must really go ! I have taken up an 
 unwarrantable amount of your time. Thank 
 you so very much, dear Herr Schmidt — no, no, 
 do not disturb yourself, 1 beg — your daughter will 
 show me the way " 
 
 *'But," cried Papa, vainly trying to detain this 
 determinedly retreating figure, "about his cha- 
 racter, his morals — we have not yet touched " 
 
 "Ah yes — so kind — I will not keep you now. 
 Another time, perhaps " 
 
 And Frau von Lindeberg got herself out of 
 the room and out of the house. Scarcely did 
 she say good-bye to me, in so great and sudden 
 a fever was she to be gone ; but she did turn on 
 the doorstep and give me a curiously intense look. 
 It began at my eyes, travelled upwards to my 
 hair, down across my face, and from there over 
 my whole body to my toes. It was a very odd 
 look. It was the most burningly critical look 
 that has ever shrivelled my flesh. 
 
 Now, what do you think of this enormous 
 long letter ? It has made me quite cheerful just 
 writing it, and I was not very cheerful when I 
 began. I hope the reading of it will do you as 
 much good. Good-bye. Write and tell me you 
 are happy. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt, 
 
 Do, do try to be happy 1
 
 LXIII 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec. 22. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — The house is quite 
 good enough for me, I assure you — the " setting," 
 I think you call it, suggesting with pleasant 
 flattery that there is something precious to be set. 
 It only has the bruised sort of colour you noticed 
 when its background is white with snow. In 
 summer against the green it looks as white as 
 you please ; but a thing must be white indeed to 
 look so in the midst of our present spotlessness. 
 And it is not damp if there are fires enough. 
 And the rooms are not too small for me — "poky " 
 was the adjective you applied to the dear little 
 things. And I am never lonely. And Joey is 
 very nice, even though he doesn't quite talk in 
 blank verse. 1 feel a sort of shame when you 
 make so much of me, when you persist in telling 
 me that the outer conditions of my life are 
 unworthy. It makes me feel so base, such a poor 
 thing. Sometimes I half believe you must be 
 poking fun. Anyhow, I don't know what you 
 would be at ; do you wish me to turn up my 
 nose at my surroundings .'' And do you see any 
 
 335
 
 336 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 good that it would do ? And the details you 
 go into ! That coffee-pot you saw and are so 
 plaintive about came to grief only the day before 
 your visit, and will, in due season, be replaced 
 by another. Meanwhile it doesn't hurt coffee 
 to be poured out of a broken spout, and it 
 doesn't hurt us to drink it after it has passed 
 through this humiliation. On the contrary, we 
 receive it thankfully into cups, and remain 
 perfectly unruffled. You say, and really you 
 say it in a kind of agony, that the broken spout, 
 you are sure, is symbolic of much that is invisible 
 in my life. You say — in effect, though your 
 words are choicer — that if you had your way my 
 life would be set about with no spouts that were not 
 whole. If you had your way ? Mr. Anstruther, 
 it is a mercy that in this one matter you have not 
 got it. What an extremely discontented creature 
 I would become if I spent my days embedded in 
 the luxury you, by a curious perverseness, think 
 should be piled around me. I would gasp ill- 
 natured epigrams from morning till night. I 
 would wring my hands, and rend the air with 
 cries of cut bono. The broken spout is a brisk 
 reminder of the transitoriness of coffee-pots and 
 of life. It sets me hurrying about my business, 
 which is first to replace it, and then by every 
 possible ingenuity to make the most of the passing 
 moment. The passing moment is what you 
 should keep your eye on, my young friend. It 
 is a slippery, flighty thing ; but, properly pounced 
 upon, lends itself fruitfully to squeezing. The
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 337 
 
 upshot of your last letter is, I gather, that for 
 some strange reason, some extremity of perverse- 
 ness, you would have me walk in silk attire, and 
 do it in halls made of marble. It suffocates me 
 only to think of it. I love my freedom and 
 forest trampings, my short skirts and swinging 
 arms. I want the wind to blow on me, and the 
 sun to burn me, and the mud to spatter me. 
 Away with caskets and settings and frames ! I 
 am not a picture or a jewel, whatever your poetic 
 eye, misled by a sly and tricky Muse, persists 
 in seeing. It would be quite a good plan, and 
 of distinctly tonic properties, for you to write 
 to Frau von Lindeberg and beg her to describe 
 me. She, it is certain, would do it very accurately, 
 untroubled by the deceptions of any muse. 
 
 How kind of you to ask me what I would 
 like for Christmas, and how funny of you to ask 
 if you might not give me a trinket. I laughed 
 over that, for did I not write to you three days 
 ago and give you an account of my conversation 
 with Joey on the subject of trinkets at Christmas ? 
 Is it possible you do not read my letters .? Is it 
 possible that, having read them, you forget them 
 so immediately ? Is it possible that proverbs lie, 
 and the sauce appropriate to the goose is not also 
 appropriate to the gander .? Give me a book. 
 There is no present I care about but that. And 
 if it happened to be a volume in the dark blue 
 binding edition of Stevenson to add to my row 
 of him, I would be both pleased and grateful. 
 Joey asked me what I wanted, so he is getting me 
 
 z
 
 33S FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 the Travels with a Donkey, Will you give me 
 Virginibus Puerisque 9 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 4 
 
 If you'd rather, you may give me a new 
 coffee-pot instead. 
 
 Later. 
 
 But only an earthenware one, like the one that 
 so much upset you.
 
 LXIV 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec. 26. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — We had a most cheer- 
 ful Christmas, and I hope you did too. 1 sent 
 you my blessing lurking in the pages of Frenssen's 
 new and very wonderful book, which ought to 
 have reached you in time to put under your tree. 
 I hope you did have a tree, and were properly 
 festive .•' The Stevenson arrived, and I found it 
 among my other presents, tied up by Johanna 
 with a bit of scarlet tape. Everything here at 
 Christmas is tied up with scarlet, or blue, or pink 
 tape, and your Stevenson lent itself admirably to 
 the treatment. Thank you very much for it, and 
 also for the little coffee set. I don't know whether 
 I ought to keep that, it is so very pretty and 
 dainty and beyond my deserts, but — it would 
 break if I packed it and sent it back again, 
 wouldn't it ? so I will keep it, and drink your 
 health out of the little cup with its garlands of 
 tiny flower-like shepherdesses. 
 
 The audacious Joey did give Vicki jewellery, 
 and a necklace if you please, the prettiest and 
 obviously the costliest thing you can imagine. 
 What happened then was in exact fulfilment of my 
 
 339
 
 340 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 prophecy ; Vicki gasped with joy and admiration, 
 he tells me, and before she had well done her 
 gasp Frau von Lindeberg, with, as I gather, a sort 
 of stately regret, took the case out of her hands, 
 shut it with a snap, and returned it to Joey. 
 
 " No," said Frau von Lindeberg. 
 
 " What's wrong with it ? " Joey says he asked. 
 
 "Too grand for my little girl," said Frau von 
 Lindeberg. "We are but humble folk." And 
 she tossed her head, said Joey. 
 
 "Ah — Dammerlitz," 1 muttered, nodding 
 with a complete comprehension. 
 
 "What ? " exclaimed Joey, starting and look- 
 ing greatly astonished. 
 
 " Go on," said I. 
 
 " But I say," said Joey, in tones of shocked 
 protest. 
 
 " What do you say ? " I asked. 
 
 " Why, how you must hate her," said Joey, 
 quite awestruck, and staring at me as though he 
 saw me for the first time. 
 
 " Hate her ? " I asked, surprised. " Why do 
 you think 1 hate her ? " 
 
 He whistled, still staring at me. 
 
 " Why do you think 1 hate her } " 1 asked 
 again, patient as I always try to be with him. 
 
 He murmured something about as soon ex- 
 pecting it of a bishop. 
 
 In my turn I stared. " Suppose you go on 
 with the story," I said, remembering the hope- 
 lessness of ever following the train of Joey's 
 thoughts.
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 34.1 
 
 Well, there appears to have been a gloom 
 after that over the festivities. You are to under- 
 stand that it all took place round the Christmas 
 tree in the best parlour, Frau von Lindeberg in 
 her black silk and lace high-festival dress, Herr 
 von Lindeberg also in black with his orders, 
 Vicki in white with blue ribbons, the son, come 
 down for the occasion, in the glories of his 
 dragoon uniform with clinking spurs and sword, 
 and the servant starched and soaped in a big em- 
 broidered apron. In the middle of these decently- 
 arrayed rejoicers, the candles on the tree lighting 
 up every inch of him, stood Joey in a Norfolk 
 jacket, gaiters, and green check tie. 
 
 " I was goin' to dress afterwards for dinner," 
 he explained plaintively ; " but how could a man 
 guess they'd all have got into their best togs at 
 four in the afternoon ^ I felt an awful fool, 1 
 can tell you." 
 
 " I expect you looked one too," said I, with 
 cheerful conviction. 
 
 There appears, then, to have descended a 
 gloom after the necklace incident on the party, 
 and a gloom of a slightly frosty nature. Vicki, it 
 is true, was rather melting than frosty, her eyes 
 full of tears, her handkerchief often at her nose, 
 but Papa Lindeberg was steeped in gloom, and 
 Frau von Lindeberg was sad with the impressive 
 Christian sadness that does not yet exclude an 
 occasional wan smile. As for the son, he twirled 
 his already much twirled moustache and stared 
 very hard at Joey.
 
 342 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 When the presents had been given, and Joey 
 found himself staggering beneath a waistcoat 
 Vicki had knitted him, and a pair of pink bed- 
 socks Frail von Lindeberg had knitted him, and 
 an empty photograph frame from Papa Lindeberg, 
 and an empty purse from the son, and a plate 
 piled miscellaneously with apples and nuts and 
 brown cakes with pictures gummed on to them, 
 he observed Frau von Lindeberg take her husband 
 aside into the remotest corner of the room and 
 there whisper with him earnestly and long. 
 While she was doing this the son, who knew no 
 English, talked with an air of one who proposed 
 to stand no nonsense to Joey, who knew no 
 German, and Vicki, visibly depressed, slunk 
 round the Christmas tree blowing her nose. 
 
 Papa Lindeberg, says Joey, came out of the 
 corner far more gloomy than he went in ; he 
 seemed like a man urged on unwillingly from 
 behind, a man reluctant to advance, and yet afraid 
 or unable to go back. 
 
 " I beg to speak with you," he said to Joey, 
 with much military stiffness about his back and 
 heels. 
 
 " Now, wasn't I right ^ " I interrupted 
 triumphantly. 
 
 " Poor old beggar," said Joey, " he looked 
 frightfully sick." 
 
 "And didn't you?" 
 
 " No," said Joey, grinning. 
 
 *' Most young men would have." 
 
 " But not this one. This one went off with
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 343 
 
 him trippin' on the points of his toes, he felt 
 so fit." 
 
 " Well, what happened then ? " 
 
 " Oh, I don't know. He said a lot of things. 
 I couldn't understand 'em, and I don't think he 
 could either ; but he was very game and stuck to 
 it once he'd begun, and went on makin' my head 
 spin, and I dare say his own too. Long and short 
 of it was that in this precious Fatherland of yours 
 the Vickis don't accept valuables except from those 
 about to become their husbands." 
 
 " I should say that the Vickis in your own or 
 any other respectable Fatherland didn't either," 
 said I. 
 
 " Well, I'm not arguin', am I ? " 
 
 " W^ell, go on." 
 
 " Well, it seemed pretty queer to think I was 
 about to become a husband, but there was nothin' 
 for it — the little girl, you see, couldn't be done 
 out of her necklace just because of that." 
 
 " I see," said I, trying to. 
 
 " On Christmas Day too — day of rejoicin' and 
 that, eh ? " 
 
 " Quite so," said I. 
 
 " So I said I was his man." 
 
 "And did he understand .? " 
 
 " No. He kept on say in' ' What .'' ' and 
 evidently cursin' the English language in German. 
 Then I suggested that Vicki should be called in 
 to interpret. He understood that, for 1 waved 
 my arms about till he did ; but he said her mother 
 interpreted better, and he would call her instead.
 
 344 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 1 understood that, and said * Get out.' He didn't 
 understand that, and while he was tryin' to I 
 went and told his wife that he'd sent for Vicki. 
 Vicki came, and we got on first rate. First thing 
 I did was to pull out the necklace and put it 
 round her neck. * Pretty as paint, ain't she ? ' 
 I said to the old man. He didn't understand that 
 either ; but Vicki did, and laughed. * You give 
 her to me and I give the necklace to her, see ? ' 
 I said, shoutin', for I felt if I shouted loud 
 enough he wouldn't be able to help understandin', 
 however naturally German he was. * Tell him 
 how simple it is,' I said to Vicki. Vicki was 
 very red but awfully cheerful, and laughed all 
 the time. She explained, 1 suppose, for he went 
 out to call his wife. Vicki and I stayed behind, 
 and " 
 
 " Well ? " 
 
 " Oh well, we waited." 
 
 " And what did Frau von Lindeberg say .'' " 
 
 *' Oh, she was all right. Asked me a lot 
 about the governor. Said Vicki's ancestors had 
 fought with the snake in the Garden of Eden, 
 or somebody far back like that — ancient lineage, 
 you know — son-in-law must be impressed. I 
 told her I didn't think my old man would 
 make any serious objection to that. *To what ?' 
 she called out, looking quite scared — they seem 
 frightfully anxious to please the governor. * He 
 don't like ancestors,' said I. * Ain't got any 
 himself and don't hold with 'em.' She pretended 
 she was smilin', and said she supposed my father
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 3+5 
 
 was an original. *Well,' said I, goin' strong for 
 once in the wit line, ' anyhow, he's not an ab- 
 orimnal like Vicki's lot seem to have been.' 
 Pretty good that, eh ? Seemed to stun 'em. 
 Then the son came in and shook both my hands 
 for about half an hour and talked a terrific lot 
 of German, and was more pleased about it than 
 any one else, as far as I could see. And then — ■ 
 well, that's about all. So I pulled off my litde 
 game rather neatly, what } " 
 
 " Yes, if it was your little game," said I, with 
 a faint stress on the your. 
 
 " Whose else should it be ? " he asked, looking 
 at me open-mouthed. 
 
 "Vicki is a little darling," was my prudent 
 reply, " and I congratulate you with all my heart. 
 Really, I am more delighted about this than 1 
 can remember ever being about anything — more 
 purely delighted, without the least shadow on 
 my honest pleasure." 
 
 And all Joey vouchsafed as a reward for my 
 ebullition of real feeling was the information that 
 he considered me quite a decent sort. 
 
 So, you see, we are very happy up on the 
 Galgenberg just now ; the lovers like a pair of 
 beaming babies, Frau von Lindcberg, sobered by 
 the shock of her good fortune into the gentle 
 kindliness that so often follows in the wake of 
 a sudden great happiness, Papa Lindcberg warmed 
 out of his tortoise-in-the-sun condition into 
 much busy letter-writing, and Vicki's brother so 
 uproariously pleased that 1 can only conclude
 
 346 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 him to be the possessor of many debts which he 
 proposes to cause Joey to pay. Life is very 
 thrilling when Love beats his wings so near. 
 There has been a great writing to Joey's father, 
 and Papa too has written, at my dictation, a letter 
 rosy with the glow of Vicki's praises. Joey 
 thinks his father will shortly appear to inspect 
 the Lindebergs. He seems to have no fears of 
 parental objections. " He's all right, my old 
 man is," he says confidently when I probe him 
 on the point ; adding just now to this invariable 
 reply, "And look here. Miss Schmidt, Vicki's all 
 right too, you see, so what's the funk about ? " 
 
 " I don't know," said I ; and I didn't even 
 after I had secretly looked in the dictionary, for 
 it was empty of any explanation of the word 
 "funk." 
 
 Yours, deeply interested In life and lovers, 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 LXV 
 
 Galgenberg, Dec. 31. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — My heartiest good 
 wishes for the New Year. May it be fruitful to 
 you in every pleasant way ; bring you interesting 
 work, agreeable companions, bright days ; and 
 may it, above all things, confirm and strengthen 
 our friendship. There now ; was ever young 
 man more thoroughly fitted out with invoked 
 blessings ? And each one wished from the in- 
 most sincerity of my heart. 
 
 But we can't come to Berlin, as you suggest 
 we should, and allow ourselves to be shown 
 round by you. Must I say thank you ? No, 
 I don't think I will. I will not pretend con- 
 ventionally with you, and I do not thank you, 
 for I don't like to have to believe that you really 
 thought I would come. And then your threat, 
 though it amused mc, vexed me too. You say 
 if 1 don't come you will be forced to suppose 
 that I'm afraid of meeting you. Kindly suppose 
 anything you like. After that, of course, I will 
 not come. What a boy you arc 1 And what an 
 odd, spoilt boy ! Why should I be afraid of 
 meeting you ? Is it, you think, because once — 
 
 347
 
 348 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 see, I am at least not afraid of speaking of it — 
 you passed across my life convulsively ? I don't 
 know that any man could stir me up now to even 
 the semblance of an earthquake. My quaking 
 days are done ; and after that one thunderous 
 upheaval I am fascinated by the charm of quiet 
 weather, and of a placid basking in a sunshine 
 I have made with my very own hands. It is 
 useless for you to tell me, as I know you will, 
 that it is only an imitation of the real thing and 
 has no heat in it. I don't want to be any hotter. 
 In this tempestuous world where everybody is so 
 eager, here is at least one woman who likes to be 
 cool and slow. How strange it is the way you 
 try to alter me, to make me quite different I 
 There seems to be a perpetual battering going 
 on at the bulwarks of my character. You want 
 to pull them down and erect new fabrics in their 
 place, fabrics so frothy and unreal that they are 
 hardly more than fancies, and would have to be 
 built up afresh every day. Yet I know you like 
 me, and want to be my friend. You make me 
 think of those quite numerous husbands who fall 
 in love with their wives because they are just 
 what they are, and after marriage expend their 
 energies training them into something absolutely 
 different. There was one in Jena while we were 
 there who fell desperately in love with a little 
 girl of eighteen, when he was about your age, 
 and he adored her utterly because she was so 
 divinely silly, ignorant, soft, and babyish. She 
 knew nothing undesirable, and he adored her for
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 349 
 
 that. She knew nothing desirable either, and he 
 adored her for that too. He adored her to such 
 an extent that all Jena, not given overmuch to 
 merriment, was distorted with mirth at the 
 spectacle. He was a clever man, a very pro- 
 mising professor, yet he found nothing more 
 profitable than to spend every moment he could 
 spare adoring. And his manner of adoring was 
 to sit earnestly discovering, by means of repeated 
 experiment, which of his fingers fitted best into 
 her dimples when she laughed, and twisting the 
 tendrils of her hair round his thumbs in an 
 endless enjoyment of the way, when he suddenly 
 let them go, they beautifully curled. He did 
 this quite openly, before us all, seeing, I suppose, 
 no reason why he should dissemble his interest 
 in his future wife's dimples and curls. But alas 
 for the dimples and curls once she was married ! 
 Oh wehy how quickly he grew blind to them. 
 And as for the divine silliness, ignorance, soft- 
 ness, and babyishness that had so deeply fascinated 
 him, just those were what got most on to his 
 nerves. He tried to do away with them, to replace 
 them by wit and learning combined with brilliant 
 achievements among saucepans and shirts, and 
 the result was disastrous. His little wife was 
 scared. Her dimples disappeared from want of 
 practice. Her pretty colours seemed suddenly 
 wiped out, as though some one had passed over 
 them roughly with a damp cloth. Her very 
 hair left off curling, and was as limp and 
 depressed as the rest of her. Let this, Mr.
 
 350 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 Anstruther, be an awful warning to you, not 
 only when you marry, but now at once in regard 
 to your friends. Do not attempt to alter those 
 long-suffering persons. It is true, you would 
 have some difficulty in altering a person like 
 myself, long ago petrified into her present horrid 
 condition, but even the petrified can and do get 
 tired of hearing the unceasing knocking of the 
 reforming mallet on their skulls. Leave me 
 alone, dear young man. Like me for anything 
 you find that can be liked, express proper in- 
 dignation at the rest of me, and go your way 
 praising God who made us all. Really it would 
 be a refreshment if you left off for a space im- 
 ploring me to change into something else. There 
 is a ring about your imploring as if you thought 
 it was mere wilfulness holding: me back from 
 being and doing all you wish. Believe me, I am 
 not wilful ; I am only petrified. I can't change. 
 1 have settled down, very comfortably I must 
 say, to the preliminary petrifaction of middle 
 age, and middle age, I begin to perceive, is a 
 blessed period in which we walk along mellowly, 
 down pleasant slopes, with nothing gusty and 
 fierce able to pierce our incrustation, no inward 
 volcanoes able to upset the surrounding rockiness, 
 nothing to distract our attention from the mild 
 serenity of the landscape, the little flowers by 
 the way, the beauty of the reddening leaves, the 
 calm and sunlit sky. You will say it is absurd 
 at twenty-six to talk of middle age, but I feel 
 it in my bones, Mr. Anstruther, I feel it in my
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 351 
 
 bones. It Is, after all, simply a question of bones. 
 Yours are twenty years younger than mine ; and 
 did I not always tell you I was old } 
 
 I am so busy that you must be extra pleased, 
 please, to get a letter to-day. The translation of 
 Papa's book has ended by interesting me to such 
 an extent that I can't leave off working at it. I 
 do it officially in his presence for an hour daily, 
 he, as full of mistrust of my English as ever, 
 trying to check it with a dictionary, and using 
 picturesque language to convey his disgust to me 
 that he should be so Imperfectly acquainted with 
 a tongue so useful. He has forgotten the little 
 he learned from my mother in the long years 
 since her death, and he has the natural conviction 
 of authors in the presence of their translators that 
 the translator Is a grossly uncultured person who 
 will leave out all the finances. For an hour I plod 
 along obediently, then I pretend I must go and 
 cook. What I really do is to run up to my 
 bedroom, lock myself in, and work away feverishly 
 for the rest of the morning at my version of the 
 book. It is, I suppose, what would be called a 
 free translation, but I protest I never met any- 
 thing quite so free. Papa's book Is charming, 
 and the charm can only be reproduced by going 
 repeatedly wholly off the lines. Accordingly 1 
 go, and find the process exhilarating and amusing. 
 The thing amuses and interests me ; 1 woiulcr if 
 it would amuse and interest other people .' I fear 
 it would not, for when 1 try to Imagine it being 
 read by my various acquaintances my heart sinks
 
 352 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 with the weight of the certainty that it couldn't 
 possibly. I imagine it in the hands of Joey, of 
 Frau von Lindeberg, of different people in Jena, 
 and the expression my inner eye sees on their 
 faces makes me unable for a long while to go on 
 with it. Then I get over that and begin working 
 again at my salad. It really is a salad, with Papa 
 as the groundwork of lettuce, very crisp and 
 fresh, and myself as the dressing and bits of 
 garnishing beetroot and hard-boiled egg. I work 
 at it half the night sometimes, so eager am I to 
 get it done and sent off. Yes, my young friend, 
 I have inherited Papa's boldness in the matter of 
 sending off, and the most impressive of London 
 publishers is shortly to hold it in his sacred hands. 
 And if his sacred hands forget themselves so far 
 as to hurl it rudely back at me they yet can never 
 take away the fun I have had writing it. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 Joey's father is expected to-morrow, and the 
 whole Galgenberg is foggy with the tumes ot 
 cooking. Once his consent is given the engage- 
 ment will be put in the papers and life will grow 
 busy and brilliant for Frau von Lindeberg. She 
 talks of removing immediately to Berlin, there to 
 give a series of crushingly well-done parties to 
 those of her friends who are supposed to have 
 laughed when Vicki was thrown over by her first 
 lover. I don't believe they did laugh ; I refuse 
 to believe in such barbarians ; but Frau von
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 353 
 
 Lindeberg, grown frank about that disastrous 
 story now that it has been so handsomely wiped 
 off Vicki's little slate, assures me that they did. 
 She doesn't seem angry any longer about it, being 
 much too happy to have room in her heart for 
 wrath, but she is bent on this one form of 
 revenge. Well, it is a form that will gratify 
 everybody, revenger and revengee equally, I should 
 think. 
 
 2 A
 
 LXVI 
 
 Galgenberg, Jan. 7. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I couldn't write before, 
 I've been too busy. The manuscript went this 
 morning after real hard work day and night, and 
 now I feel like a squeezed lemon that yet is 
 cheerful, if you can conceive such a thing. Joey's 
 father has been and gone. He arrived late one 
 night, inspected the Lindebergs, gave his consent, 
 and was off twenty-four hours later. The Linde- 
 bergs were much disconcerted by these quick 
 methods, they who like to move slowly, think 
 slowly, and sit hours over each meal ; and they 
 had not said half they wanted to say, and he had 
 not eaten half he was intended to eat before he 
 was gone. Also, he disconcerted them — indeed, 
 it was more than that, he upset them utterly, by 
 not looking like what they had made up their 
 minds he would look like. The Galgenberg 
 expected to see some one who should be blatantly 
 rich, and blatant riches, it dimly felt, would be 
 expressed by much flesh and a thick watch chain. 
 Instead, the man had a head like Julius Caesar, 
 lean, thoughtful, shrewd, and a spare body that 
 
 35+
 
 FRAULEIN SCHxMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 355 
 
 made Papa LIndeberg's seem strangely pulpy and 
 as if it were held together only by the buttons of 
 his clothes. We were staggered. Frau von 
 Lindeberg couldn't understand why a man so rich 
 should also be so thin — " He is in a position to 
 have the costliest cooking," she said several times, 
 looking at me with amazed eyebrows ; nor could 
 she understand why a man without ancestors 
 should yet make her husband, whose past bristles 
 with them, be the one to look as if he hadn't got 
 any. She mused much, and aloud. While Vicki 
 was being run breathlessly over the mountains 
 by her nimble future father-in-law, with Joey, 
 devoured by pride in them both, in attendance, 
 I went down to ask if I could help in the cooking, 
 and found her going about her kitchen like one 
 in a dream. She let me tuck up my sleeves and 
 help her, and while I did it she gave vent to 
 many musings about England and its curious 
 children. " Strange, strange people," she kept 
 on saying helplessly. 
 
 But she is the happiest woman in Germany at 
 this moment, happier far than Vicki, for she sees 
 with her older eyes the immense advantages that 
 are to be Vicki's, who sees at present nothing at 
 all but Joey. And then the deliciousness of 
 being able to write to all those relations grown of 
 late so supercilious, to Cousin Mienchen who 
 came and played the rich, and tell them the 
 glorious news. Vicki basks in the sunshine of 
 a mother's love again, and never hears a cross 
 word. Good things are showered down on her,
 
 356 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 presents, pettings, admiration, all those charming 
 things that every girl should enjoy once before 
 her pretty girlhood has gone. It is the most 
 delightful experience to see a family in the very 
 act of receiving a stroke of luck. Strokes of 
 luck, especially of these dimensions, are so very 
 rare. It is like being present at a pantomime 
 that doesn't leave off, and watching the good 
 fairy touching one grey dull unhappy thing after 
 another into radiance and smiles. But I lose my 
 friends, for they go to Berlin almost immediately, 
 and from there to Manchester on a visit to 
 Mr. Collins, a visit during which the business 
 part of the marriage is to be settled. Also, and 
 naturally, we lose Joey. This is rather a blow, 
 just as we had begun so pleasantly to roll in 
 his money ; but where Vicki goes he goes too, 
 and so Papa and I will soon be left again alone 
 on our mountain, face to face with vegetarian 
 economies. 
 
 Well, it has been a pleasant interlude, and I 
 who first saw Vicki steeped in despair, red-eyed, 
 piteous, slighted, talked about, shall see her at 
 last departing down the hill arrayed in glory as 
 with a garment. Then I shall turn back, when 
 the last whisk of her shining skirts has gleamed 
 round the bend of the road, to my own business, 
 to the sober trudging along the row of days 
 allotted me, to the making of economies, the 
 reading of good books, the practice of abstract 
 excellences, the pruning of my soul. My soul, 
 1 must say, has had some vigorous prunings. It
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 357 
 
 ought by now to be of an admirable sturdiness. 
 You yourself once lopped off a most luxuriant 
 growth that was, I agree, best away, and now 
 these buds of friendship, of easier circumstances, 
 are going to be nipped off too, and when they are 
 gone what will be left, I wonder, but the uncom- 
 promising and the rugged ? Is it possible I am 
 so base as to be envious ? In spite of my real 
 pleasure I can't shut out a certain wistfulness, a 
 certain little pang, and exactly what kind of 
 wistfulness it is and exactly what kind of pang I 
 don't well know, unless it is envy. Vicki's lot is 
 the last one I would choose, yet it makes me 
 wistful. It includes Joey, yet I feel a little pang. 
 This is very odd ; for Joey as a husband, a 
 person from whom you cannot get away, would 
 be rather more than I could suffer with any show 
 of gladness. How, then, can I be envious ? Of 
 course, if Joey knew what I am writing he would 
 thrust an incredulous tongue in his cheek, wink 
 a sceptical eye, and mutter some eternal truth 
 about grapes ; but I, on the other hand, would 
 watch him doing it with the perfect calm of him 
 who sticks unshakably to his point. What 
 would his cheek, his tongue, and his winking eye 
 be to me ? They would leave me wholly un- 
 moved, not a hair's breadth moved from my 
 original point, which is that Joey is not a person 
 you can marry. But certainly it is a good and 
 delightful thing that Vicki thinks he is and 
 thinks it with such conviction. I tell you the 
 top of our mountain is in a ju-rpctual rosy glow
 
 358 FRAULKIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 nowadays, as though the sun never left it ; and 
 the entire phenomenon is due solely to these two 
 joyful young persons. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt,
 
 LXVII 
 
 Galgenberg, Jan. 12. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I did a silly thing 
 to-day : I went and mourned in an empty house. 
 I don't think I'm generally morbid, but to-day 
 I indulged in a perfect orgy of morbidness. Write 
 and scold me. It is your turn to scold, and by 
 doing it thoroughly you will bring me back to 
 my ordinary cheerful state. The Lindebergs are 
 gone, and I am feeling It absurdly. 1 didn't 
 realize how much I loved that little dear Vicki, 
 nor in the least the Interest Frau von LIndeberg's 
 presence and doings gave life. The last three 
 weeks have been so thrilling, there was so much 
 warmth and brightness going about, that it reached 
 even onlookers like myself, and warmed and 
 lighted them ; and now in the twinkling of an 
 eye It Is gone — gone, wiped out, snuffed out, and 
 Papa and I are alone again, and there is a north- 
 east wind. These arc the times when philosophy 
 is so useful ; but do explain why It is that one is 
 only a philosopher so long as one is happy. When 
 I am contented, and everything is just as I like 
 It, I can philosophize beautifully, and do It with 
 a hearty sincerity that convinces both myself and 
 
 359
 
 36o FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 the person listening to me ; but when the bad 
 days come, the empty days, the disappointing, 
 chilly days, behold Philosophy, that serene and 
 dignified companion so long as the weather was 
 fine, clutching her academic skirts hastily together 
 and indulging in the form of rapid retreat known 
 to the vulgar and the graphic as skedaddling. 
 " Do not all charms fly," your Keats inquires, 
 " at the mere touch of cold Philosophy ? " But 
 I have found that nothing flies quite so fast as 
 cold Philosophy herself; she would win in any 
 race when the race is who shall run away quickest ; 
 she is of no use whatever — it is my deliberate 
 conclusion — except to sit with in the sun on the 
 south side of a sheltering wall on those calm 
 afternoons of life when you've only got to open 
 your mouth and ripe peaches drop into it. 1 
 used to think if I could love her enough she 
 would, in her gratitude, chloroform me safely 
 over all the less pleasant portions of life, see to 
 it that I was unconscious during the passage, 
 never let me be aware of anything but the 
 beautiful and the good ; but either she has no 
 gratitude or I have little love, and the years have 
 brought me the one conviction that she is an 
 artist at leaving you in the lurch. The world is 
 strewn with persons she has left in it, and out of 
 the three inhabitants of a mountain to leave one 
 there is surely an enormous percentage. Now, 
 what is your opinion of a woman with a healthy 
 body, a warm room, and a sufficient dinner, who 
 feels as though the soul within her were an
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 361 
 
 echoing cavern, empty, cold, and dark ? It is 
 what 1 feel at this moment, and it is shameful. 
 Isn't it shameful that the sight of leaden clouds 
 — but they really are dreadful clouds, inky, 
 ragged, harassed — scudding across the sky, and 
 of furious brown beech-leaves on the little trees 
 in front of the Lindebergs' deserted house being 
 lashed and maddened by the wind, should make 
 me suddenly catch my breath for pain ? It is 
 pain, quite sharp, unmistakable pain, and it is 
 because I am alone, and my friends gone, and the 
 dusk is falling. This afternoon I leaned against 
 their gate and really suffered. Regret for the 
 past, fear for the future — vague, rather terrifying 
 fears, not wholly unconnected with you — hurt so 
 much that they positively succeeded in wringing 
 a tear out of me. It was a very reluctant tear, 
 and only came out after a world of wringing, and 
 I had stood there a most morbid long time before 
 it appeared ; but it did appear, and the vicious 
 wind screamed round the Lindebergs' blank 
 house, rattled its staring naked windows, banged 
 in wild gusts about the road where the puddles 
 of half-melted snow reflected the blackness ot the 
 sky, tore at my hair and dress, stung my cheeks, 
 shook the gate I held on to, thundered over the 
 hills. Dear young man, I don't want to afllict 
 you with these tales of woe and weakness, but I 
 must tell you what I did next. I went up and 
 got the key from Johanna, in whose keeping 
 Frau von Lindeberg had left it, and came down 
 again, and unlocked the door ot the house lately
 
 362 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 so full of light and life, and crept fearfully about 
 the echoing rooms and up the dismal stairs, and 
 let myself go, as I tell you, to a very orgy of 
 morbidness. It was like a nightmare. Memories 
 took the form of ghosts, and clutched at me 
 through the balusters and from behind doors 
 with thin cold fingers ; and the happiest memories 
 were those that clutched the coldest. I fled at 
 last in a sudden panic, flying out of reach of 
 them, slamming the door to, running for my life 
 up the road and in at our gate. Johanna did 
 not let me in at once, and I banged with my fists 
 in a frenzy to get away from the black sky and 
 the threatening thunder of the storm-stricken 
 pines. " Herr Gott^' said Johanna, when she saw 
 me ; so that I must have looked rather wild. 
 
 Well, 1 am weak, you see, just as weak and 
 silly as the very weakest and silliest in spite of 
 my big words and brave face. I am writing now 
 as near the stove as possible in Papa's room, glad 
 to be with him, glad to be warm, grateful to sit 
 with somebody alive after that hour with the 
 ghosts ; and the result of deep considering has 
 been to force me to face the fact that there is 
 much meanness in my nature. There is. Don't 
 bother to contradict ; there is. All my forlorn- 
 ness since yesterday is simply the outcome of a 
 mixture of envy and self-pity. I do miss dear 
 Vicki, whom I greatly loved, 1 do miss the cheery 
 Joey, I miss Papa Lindeberg who likened me to 
 Hebe, I miss his wife who kept me in my proper 
 place — it is quite true that I miss these people,
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 363 
 
 but that would never of itself be a feelincr strongs 
 enough to sweep me off my feet into black pools 
 of misery as I was swept this afternoon, and never, 
 never would make me, who have so fine a con- 
 tempt for easy tears, cry. No, Mr. Anstruther, 
 bitter truths once seen have to be stared at 
 squarely, and I am simply comparing my lot with 
 Vicki's and being sorry for myself. It is amazing 
 that It should be so, for have 1 not everything 
 a reasonable being needs, and am I not, then, a 
 reasonable being .'' And the meanness of it ; for 
 it does imply a grudging, an uneasiness in the 
 presence of somebody else's happiness. Well, 
 I'm thoroughly ashamed, and that at least is a 
 good thing ; and now that you know how badly 
 I too need lecturing, and how I am torn by 
 particularly ungenerous emotions, perhaps you'll 
 see what a worthless person I am, and will take 
 me down from the absurd high pinnacle on which 
 you persist in keeping mc, and on which 1 have 
 felt so desperately uncomfortable for months past. 
 It is infinitely humiliating, I do assure you, to be 
 — shall we say venerated ? for excellences one 
 would like to possess but is most keenly aware 
 one docs not. Persons with any tendency to be 
 honest about themselves and with even the 
 smallest grain of a sense of humour should never 
 be chosen as idols and set up alott in giddy places. 
 They make shockingly bad idols. They are 
 divided by a desire to laugh and an immense 
 pity for the venerator. 
 
 I add these observations, dear friend, to the
 
 364 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 description of my real nature that has gone before 
 because your letters are turning more and more 
 into the sort of letters that ends a placid friend- 
 ship. 1 want to be placid. 1 love being placid. 
 I insist on being placid. And the thought of 
 your letters, with so little of placidness about 
 them, was with me this afternoon in that terrible 
 house, and it added to the fear of the future that 
 seized me by the throat and would not let me 
 go. Is it, then, so impossible to be friends, just 
 friends with a man, in the same dear frank way 
 one is with another woman, or a man is with a 
 man ^ I hoped you and 1 were going to prove 
 the possibility triumphantly. 1 even, so keenly 
 do I desire it, prayed that we were. But perhaps 
 there is little use in such praying. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 You may scold me as much as you like, but 
 you are not to comfort me. Do not make the 
 mistake, I earnestly beg you, of supposing that 
 1 want to be comforted.
 
 LXVIII 
 
 Galgenberg, Jan. 13. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Just a line to tell you 
 that I have recovered, and you are not to take 
 my letter yesterday too seriously. I woke up 
 this morning perfectly normal, and able to look 
 out on the day before me with the usual interest. 
 Then something very nice happened : my trans- 
 lation of Papa's book didn't come back, but 
 instead arrived an urbane letter expressing a kind 
 of reluctant willingness, if you can imagine the 
 mixture, to publish it. "What do you think of 
 that ? The letter, it is true, goes on to suggest, 
 still with urbanity, that no doubt no one will ever 
 buy it, but promises if ever any one does to send 
 us a certain just portion of what was paid for it. 
 " Observe, Rose-Marie," said Papa, when his first 
 delight had calmed, "the unerring instinct with 
 which the English, very properly called a nation 
 of shopkeepers, instantly recognize the value of 
 a good thing when they see it. Consider the 
 long years during which I have vainly beaten at 
 the doors of the German public, and compare its 
 deafness with the quick response of our alert and 
 admirable cousins across the Channel. Well do 
 
 3'''5
 
 366 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 I know which was the part that specially appealed 
 
 to this man's business instinct " 
 
 And he mentioned, while my guilty ears 
 burned crimson, a chapter of statistics, the whole 
 of which I had left out. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt.
 
 LXIX 
 
 Galgenberg, Jan. 14. 
 
 Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I see no use whatever 
 in a friend if one cannot tell him about one's 
 times of gloom without his immediately proposing 
 to do the very thing one doesn't want him to do, 
 which is to pay one a call. Your telegram has 
 upset me, you see, into a reckless use of the 
 word " one," a word I spend hours sometimes 
 endeavouring to circumvent, and which I do 
 circumvent if I am in good bodily and spiritual 
 health, but the moment my vitality is lowered, as 
 it is now by your telegram, I cease to be either 
 strong enough or artful enough to dodge it. There 
 are four of it in that sentence : I fling them to 
 you in a handful, only remarking that they are 
 your fault, not mine. 
 
 Now, listen to me — I will drop this playful- 
 ness, which I don't in the least feel, and be 
 serious : — why do you want to come and, as you 
 telegraph, talk things over .'' I don't want to 
 talk things over ; it is a fatal thing to do. May 
 1 not tell you frankly of my moods, of my downs 
 as well as of my ups, without at once setting you 
 
 off in the direction of too much kindness.'' After 
 
 367
 
 368 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 I had written that letter I was afraid ; and I 
 opened it again to tell you it was not your com- 
 fortings and pityings that I wanted, but the sterner 
 remedy of a good scolding ; yet your answer is 
 a telegram to ask if you may come. Of course 
 I telegraphed back that I should not be here. 
 It is quite true : I should not if you came. I 
 will not see you. Nothing can be gained by it, 
 and everything might be lost — oh, everything, 
 everything might be lost. I would see to it that 
 you did not find me. The forests are big, and 
 I can walk, if needs be, for hours. You will think 
 me quite savagely unkind, but I can't help that. 
 Perhaps if your letters lately had been different 
 I would not so obstinately refuse to see you, but 
 I have a wretched feeling that my poor soul is 
 going to be pruned again, pruned of its last, most 
 pleasant growth, and you are on the road to saying 
 and doing things we shall both be for ever sorry 
 for. I have tried my best to stop you, to pull 
 you up, and I hope with all my heart that I may 
 not be going to get a letter that will spoil things 
 irreparably. Have not my hints been big enough ? 
 Let me beg you not to write foolishnesses that 
 cannot, once sent, be got back again and burned. 
 But at least when you sit down to write you can 
 consider your words, and those that have come 
 out too impulsively can go into the fire ; while 
 if you came here what would you do with your 
 tongue, I wonder ? There is no means of stopping 
 that once it is well started, and the smallest thing 
 sets it off" in terrible directions. Am I not your
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 369 
 
 friend ? Will you not spare me ? Must I be 
 forced to speak with a plainness that will, by 
 comparison, make all my previous plainness seem 
 the very essence of polite artificialness ? Of all 
 the wise counsel any one could offer you at this 
 moment there is none half so wise, none that, 
 taken, would be half so precious to us both, as 
 the counsel to leave well alone. I offer it you 
 earnestly ; oh, more than earnestly — with a 
 passionate anxiety lest you should refuse it. 
 Your sincere friend, 
 
 Rose-Marie Schmidt. 
 
 T suppose it is true what I have often 
 suspected, that I am a person doomed to lose, 
 one by one, the things that have been most dear 
 to me. 
 
 2 H
 
 LXX 
 
 Jan. 1 6. 
 
 Well, there Is no help, then. You will do it. 
 You will put an end to it. You have written 
 me a love-letter, the thing I have been trying so 
 hard for so long to stop your doing, and there is 
 nothing to be done but to drop into silence. 
 
 LXXI 
 
 Jan. 17. 
 
 But what Is there possible except silence .'' I 
 will not marry you. 1 cannot after this keep you 
 my friend. 
 
 370
 
 LXXIl 
 
 Jan. 19. 
 
 Oh, I have tried, I have hoped to keep you. It 
 has been so sweet to me. It has made everything 
 so different. For the second time you have 
 wiped the brightness out of my life. 
 
 LXXIII 
 
 Jan. 21. 
 
 Leave me alone. Don't torment me with wild 
 letters. I do not love you. I will not marry you. 
 I cared for you sincerely as a friend, but what a 
 gulf there is between that and the abandonment 
 of worship last year in Jena. Only just that, just 
 that breathless passion, would make me marry, 
 and I would never feel it for a man I am forced 
 to pity. Is not worship a looking up .'' a rapture 
 of faith .'' 1 cannot look up to you. 1 have no 
 faith in you. Leave me alone. 
 
 37«
 
 LXXIV 
 
 Jan. 22. 
 
 Let us consider the thing cahnly. Let us try 
 
 to say good-bye without too great a clamour. 
 
 What is the use, after all, of being so vocal ? 
 
 We have each given the other many hours of 
 
 pleasure, and shall we not be grateful rather than 
 
 tragic ? Here we are, got at last to the point 
 
 where we face the inevitable, and we may as well 
 
 do it decently. See, here is a woman who does 
 
 not love you : would you have her marry you 
 
 when she had rather not ? And you mustn't be 
 
 angry with me because I don't love you, for how 
 
 can I help it ? So far am I from the least 
 
 approach to it that it makes me tired just to 
 
 think of a thing so strenuous, of the bother of 
 
 it, of the perpetual screwed-up condition of mind 
 
 and body to a pitch above the normal. The 
 
 normal is what I want. My heart is set upon it. 
 
 I don't want ecstasies. 1 don't want excitement. 
 
 I don't want alternations of bliss and terror. I 
 
 want to be that peaceful individual a maiden 
 
 lady, — a maiden lady looking after her aged 
 
 father, tending her flowers, fondling her bees — 
 
 no, I don't think she could fondle bees, — fondling 
 
 a cat, then, which I haven't yet got. Oh, I know 
 
 372
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 373 
 
 I have moods of a more tempestuous nature, 
 such as the one I was foolish enough to write 
 to you about the other day, stirring you up to 
 a still more violent tempestuousness yourself, 
 but they roll away again when they have growled 
 themselves out, and the mood that succeeds them 
 is like clear shining after rain. I intend this 
 clear shining as I grow older to be more and 
 more my surrounding atmosphere. I make the 
 bravest resolutions ; will you not make some 
 too ? Dear late friend and sometime lover, do 
 not want me to give you what I have not got. 
 We are both suffering just now ; but what about 
 Time, that kindest soother, softener, healer, that 
 final tidier up of ragged edges, and sweeper away 
 of the broken fragments of the past ?
 
 LXXV 
 
 Jan. 23. 
 
 I TELL you you have taken away what 1 held 
 precious for the second time, and there shall be 
 no third. You showed me once that you could 
 not be a faithful lover, you have shown me now 
 you cannot be a faithful friend. I am not an 
 easy woman, who can be made much of and 
 dropped in an unending see-saw. Even if I 
 loved you we would be most wretched married, 
 you with the feeling that I did not fit into your 
 set, I with the knowledge that you felt so, besides 
 the deadly fear of you, of your changes and fits 
 of hot and cold. But I do not love you. This 
 is what you seem unable to realize. Yet it is 
 true, and it settles everything for ever. 
 
 374
 
 LXXVI 
 
 Jan. 25. 
 
 Must there be so much explaining ? It was 
 because I thought I was making amends that way 
 for having, though unconsciously, led you to fancy 
 you cared for me last year. I wanted to be of 
 some use to you, and I saw how much you liked 
 to get them. By gradual degrees, as we both 
 grew wiser, I meant my letters to be a help to 
 you who have no sister, no mother, and a fither 
 you don't speak to. I was going to be the 
 person to whom you could tell everything, on 
 whose devotion and sincerity you could always 
 count. It was to have been a thing so honest, 
 so frank, so clear, so affectionate. And I've not 
 even had time really to begin, for at first there 
 was my own struggling to get out of the deep 
 waters where I was drowning, and afterwards it 
 seemed to be nothing but a staving off, a writing 
 about other things, a determined telling of little 
 anecdotes, of talk about our neighbours, about 
 people you don't know, about anything rather 
 than your soul ami my soul. I'.ach time I talked 
 of those, in moments of greater stress when the 
 longing for a real friend to whom I could write 
 openly was stronger than 1 coukl resist, there 
 
 375
 
 376 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 
 
 came a letter back that made my heart stand still. 
 1 had lost my lover, and it seemed as if I must 
 lose my friend. At first I believed that you 
 would settle down. I thought it could only be 
 a question of patience. But you could not wait, 
 you could not believe you were not going to be 
 given what you wanted in exactly the way you 
 wanted it, and you have killed the poor goose 
 after all, the goose I have watched so anxiously, 
 who was going to lay us such beautiful golden 
 eggs. I am very sorry for you. I know the 
 horrors of loving somebody who doesn't love 
 you. And it is terrible for us both that you 
 should not understand me to the point, as you 
 say, of not being able to believe me. I have not 
 always understood myself, but here everything 
 seems so plain. Love is not a thing you can 
 pick up and throw into the gutter and pick up 
 again as the fancy takes you. I am a person, 
 very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar 
 dread of thrusting myself or my affections on 
 any one, of in any way outstaying my welcome. 
 The man 1 would love would be the man I could 
 trust to love me for ever. I do not trust you. 
 1 did outstay my welcome once. 1 did get thrown 
 into the gutter, and came near drowning in that 
 sordid place. Oh, call me hard, wickedly revenge- 
 ful, unbelievably cruel if it makes you feel less 
 miserable — but will you listen to a last prophecy ? 
 You will get over this as surely as you have got 
 over your other similar vexations, and you will 
 live to say, " Thank God that German girl — what
 
 FRAULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER 377 
 
 was her name ? wasn't it Schmidt ? good heavens, 
 yes — thank God she was so foolish as not to 
 take advantage of an unaccountable but strictly 
 temporary madness." 
 
 And if I am bitter, forgive me.
 
 LXXVII 
 
 It would be useless. 
 
 LXXVIII 
 I WOULD not see you. 
 
 LXXIX 
 
 I DO not love you. 
 
 378 
 
 Jan. 27. 
 
 Jan. 29. 
 
 Jan. 31.
 
 LXXX 
 
 I WILL never marry you. 
 
 LXXXI 
 
 I SHALL Jiot write again. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Feb. z. 
 
 Feh. 
 
 rRIHTRD BY WII.I lAM CLOWKS ANP SOXS, UMITnD, LONDON AND IircCI m.
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CAVLORO 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.A .
 
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 AA 000 596 740 i