'And--and tents don't have them,' finished Tante Else, looking round at us with a sort of mild surprise at having succeeded in talking so much about something that was neither neighbors nor housekeeping. '_Quatsch_,' said Onkel Heinrich. 'My dear,' protested Tante Else, forced at last to notice these comments. 'I say it is _quatsch_,' said Onkel Heinrich with a volcanic vehemence startling in one so trim. 'Really, my dear,' said Tante Else. 'I repeat it,' said Onkel Heinrich. 'Do not think, my dear--' 'I do not think, I know. Am I to sit silent, to have no opinion, in my own house? At my own table?' 'My dear--' 'If you do not like to hear the truth, refrain from talking nonsense.' 'My dear Heinrich--will you not try--in the presence of--of relations, and of--of our children--' Her voice shook a little, and she stopped, and began with great haste and exactness to fold up her table-napkin. '_Ach--quatsch_' said Onkel Heinrich again, irritably pushing back his chair. He waddled to a cupboard--of course he doesn't get much exercise in his cage, so he can only waddle--and took out a box of cigars. 'Come, Ferdinand,' he said, 'let us go and smoke together in my room and leave the dear women to the undisturbed enjoyment of their wits.' 'I do not smoke,' said Papa briefly. 'Come then while I smoke,' said Onkel Heinrich. 'Nay, I fear thee, Heinrich,' said Papa. 'I fear thy tongue applied to my weak places. I fear thine eye, measuring their deficiencies. I fear thy intelligence, known to be great--' 'Worth exactly,' said Onkel Heinrich suddenly facing us, the cigarbox under his arm, his cross owl's eyes rounder than ever, 'worth exactly, on the Berlin brain market, eight thousand marks a year.' 'I know, I know,' cried Papa, 'and I admire--I admire. But there is awe mingled with my admiration, Heinrich,--awe, respect, terror. Go, thou man of brains and marketableness, thou man of worth and recognition, go and leave me here with these lesser intellects. I fear thee, and I will not watch thee smoke.' And he got up and raised Tante Else's hand to his lips with great gallantry and wished her, after our pleasant fashion at the end of meals, a good digestion. But Tante Else, though she tried to smile and return his wishes, could not get back again into her _rôle_ of serene and conversational _Hausfrau._ My uncle waddled away, shooting a sniff of scorn over his shoulder as he went, and my aunt endeavored to conceal the fact that she was wiping her eyes. Lieschen and Elschen began to talk to me both at once. My step-mother cleared her throat, and remarked that successful public men often had to pay for their successes by being the victims at home of nerves, and that their wives, whose duty it is always to be loving, might be compared to the warm and soothing iron passed over a shirt newly washed, and deftly, by its smooth insistence, flattening away each crease.