It was curious to notice how things English had risen in public estimation when once they were hard to get. Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits, for instance, ruled the German market in time of peace. No German biscuit can be compared with them for a minute. An officer we knew wrote home asking his mother to send him out some biscuits. She trudged all over Bonn in search of Huntley and Palmer’s. At one shop they offered her German ones, saying they were just as good. She flared up at once. “Do you think,” she said, “I would send German biscuits to my son at the front?” Finally the indomitable old lady managed to get a tin of English biscuits, and she sent them off. All the mourning crêpe, arm-bands, and so on, worn in Germany were imported from England, even long after war was declared. A merchant told me that the Germans could not manufacture it, they simply had to have English crêpe! Jokes were often cut at the expense of the business instincts of the English; they got up a war to kill German soldiers in order to sell mourning to their mothers and wives. I could hear of nothing else being imported from England except English books. All the new publications on the English market arrived regularly and could be inspected at the University Library. Even the little propaganda booklets of the Clarendon Press were there. I subscribed to the _Morning Post_ through a Dutch bookseller and for nearly a year received every number, except the one describing the attack on Scarborough. That was suppressed. Although I had nothing to complain of, Englishwomen married to Germans were subject to the bitterest persecution. Coffee parties would be formed, to which they would be invited, and then each guest present in turn, by those little stabs that women know so well how to inflict, would see how she could torture the “Engländerin.” A certain “_Professorenfrau_” we knew wanted to try the same tactics on me. She made the most extravagant efforts to convert me to her way of thinking. When everything else had failed she even visited the members of my household and suggested they should make my life a hell to me until they had brought me round to the German point of view. Then she tried to entrap me. She was putting on the usual pose, asserting that Germany had never expected that England would make war on her and that nothing had surprised her more. [SN: A VIRAGO]