While I copy he comes in and out to ask me 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 disquisition 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 constitutionally 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, jerking out little anecdotes, very pleasant little anecdotes, but quite unconnected with his patient 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 consideration. 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.'