It is rather dreadful when they quarrel. Then, of course, Johanna sulks as girls will, and sulks are silent things, so that the trumpet has to fill up a yawning gulf and never leaves off at all. Last Sunday it blew the whole time we were out, and I expected when I got home to find the engagement broken off. We stayed away as long as we could, climbing higher and higher, wandering further and further, supping at last reluctantly on cucumber salad and cold herrings in the little restaurant up on the Schweizerhohe because the trumpet wouldn't stop and we didn't dare go home till it did. Its blasts pursued us even into the recesses of the dingy wooden hall we took our ears into, vainly trying to carry them somewhere out of range. It seemed to be a serious quarrel. We had a depressing meal. We both esteem Johanna with the craven esteem you feel for a person, at any moment capable of giving notice, who does all the unpleasant things you would otherwise have to do yourself. The state of her temper seriously affects our peace. You see, the house is small, and if her trumpeter has been unsatisfactory and she throws the saucepans about or knocks the broom in sweeping against all the wooden things like doors and skirting-boards, it makes an unendurable clatter and puts an end at once to Papa's work and to my equally earnest play. If, her nerves being already on edge, I were to suggest to her even smilingly to be quiet, she would at once give notice--I know she would--and the dreary search begin again for that impossible treasure you in England call a paragon and we in Jena call a pearl. Where am I to find a clean, honest, strong pearl, able to cook and willing to come and live in what is something like an unopened oyster-shell, so shut-up, so cut-off so solitary would her existence here be, for eight pounds a year? It is easy for you august persons who never see your servants, who have so many that by sheer force of numbers they become unnoticeable, to deride us who have only one for being so greatly at her mercy. I know you will deride. I see your letter already: 'Dear Fräulein Schmidt, Is not your attitude toward the maid Johanna unworthy?' It isn't unworthy, because it is natural. Defiantly I confess that it is also cringing. Well, it is natural to cringe under the circumstances. So would you. I dare say if your personal servant is a good one, and you depend much on him for comfort, you do do it as it is. And there are very few girls in Jena who would come out of it and take a situation on the side of a precipice for eight pounds a year. Really the wages are small, balanced against the disadvantages. And wages are going up. Down in Jena a good servant can get ten pounds a year now without much difficulty. So that it behooves us who cannot pay such prices to humor Johanna.