He says that if those blind and prejudiced persons, publishers, won't risk bringing it out he'll bring it out at his own expense sooner than prevent the world's rightly knowing what Goethe said and did in Jena; so there's a serious eventuality ahead of us! We really will have to live on lettuces, and in grimmest earnest this time. I hope he won't want to keep race-horses next. Well, one thing has happened that will go a little way toward meeting new expenses,--I go down every day now and read English with Vicki, at the desire of her mother, for two hours, her mother having come to the conclusion that it is better to legalize, as it were, my relations with Vicki who flatly refused to keep away from us. So I am a bread-winner, and can do something to help Papa. It is true I can't help much, for what I earn is fifty pfennings each time, and as the reading of English on Sundays is not considered nice I can only altogether make three marks a week. But it is something, and it is easily earned, and last Sunday, which was the end of my first week, I bought the whole of the Sunday food with it, dinner and supper for us, and beer for Johanna's lover, who says he cannot love her unless the beer is a particular sort and has been kept for a fortnight properly cold in the coal-hole. Since I have read with Vicki Frau von Lindeberg is quite different. She is courteous with the careful courtesy decent people show their dependents; kindly, even gracious at times. She is present at the reading, darning socks and ancient sheets with her carefully kept fingers, and she treats me absolutely as though I were attached to her household as governess. She is no longer afraid we will want to be equals. She asks me quite often after the health of him she calls my good father. And when a cousin of hers came last week to stay a night, a female Dammerlitz on her way to a place where you drink waters and get rid of yourself, she presented me to her with pleasant condescension as the _kleine Engländerin_ engaged as her daughter's companion. '_Eine recht Hebe Hausgenossin,'_ she was pleased to add, gently nodding her head at each word; and the cousin went away convinced I was a resident official and that the tales she had heard about the Lindeberg's poverty couldn't be true. 'It's not scriptural,' I complained to Vicki, stirred to honest indignation. 'You mean, to say things not quite--not quite?' said Vicki. 'Such big ones,' I fumed. 'I'm not little. I'm not English. I'm not a _Hausgenossin_. Why such unnecessary ones?' 'Now, Rose-Marie, you do know why Mamma said "little."' 'It's a term of condescension?' 'And _Engländerins_ are rather grand things to have in the house, you know--expensive, I mean. Always dearer than natives. Mamma only wants Cousin Mienchen to suppose we are well off.' 'Oh,' said I. 'You don't mind?' said Vicki, rather timidly taking my hand.