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 wonderful 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 preoccupied 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-rimmed _pince-nez_, 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 were straight, and red-eyed, 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 Berlin. 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 eat, and read the paper?' she murmured. 'Sleep, and eat, and read the paper?' I echoed.