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, now, 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 Lindebergs 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, unpleasant, 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 honors 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. 'Oh,' said I, trying to imagine how pastors would look seen from that.