"Oh! Men are always like that, dear. You'll be like it yourself when you're a grown man. No matter how much a man loves a woman he gets free from her somehow inside a tobacco shop. But I hope you want to see Kiel for better reasons than that." He nodded as he patted my hand. "I know. It's the Kaiser's jewel of a port, where he hugs up the beginnings of his navy." "Yes--his navy which he thinks will one day beat ours. I hope we shall be able to see one or two of his ships--yet I don't expect we shall. He believes in the old saying that children and fools--especially British fools--shouldn't see half-done work." "If you don't mind, Big Yeogh Wough, I'm not going to wear my glasses when we go ashore there to-morrow. I don't really need them to see with, you know, and I don't want to look as if I'd got anything wrong with me when I'm going through a German town." "All right, you dear boy. And we'll try to get a look at Wilhelm's ships. But what does it matter what they are like? We'll drum them up the North Sea as we drummed others before them. We've nothing to fear from outsiders as long as we don't let any dry rot get into us at home." "Kitchener and others like him will see to that." "Kitchener can't see to everything. It would take scores of great men to make a breakwater against a whole flood of dull stupidity. We've all got to help. You'll have to help a lot. You'll have to learn to be very strong--but without being hard. If you are hard you're like a hyacinth in a March gale as compared with a daffodil. The hyacinth stands up stiffly and thinks it's strong, but the wind snaps it in a minute, while the bending daffodil comes out all right. It's always like that with men who try to kill their softer side, and who don't understand women and don't trust them. And now you must go to sleep." "Will you promise to wake me up when you come to bed and want your dress undone? I'm so much easier to wake than father." "Yes, I'll wake you. You see, your knowing how to undo my dress will make you a better magistrate one day, or a better governor of an Indian province. There are people who wouldn't see how this is so, but it's true." Kiel looked quite gay when we opened our eyes upon it next morning. It would have looked gayer still if the ships in the harbour had not been of such a hideous dull grey colour--exactly that of an insect that I have always detested, known as the slater. The Kaiser's private pleasure yacht, the _Hohenzollern_, was there and was certainly white; but it was a white that looked as if it ought to have been grey. I have no doubt that the _Hohenzollern_ was a miracle of luxury inside, with her silver bath for the Kaiser's daughter and other sybaritic appointments; but outside she was not a dream of loveliness. Neither were the two warships that we saw anything like as handsome to behold as our own battleships.