I sometimes think the Germans themselves lose much by their rather overdeveloped tendency to meet not so often in one another's homes as in a neutral place: a restaurant, a garden, a Verein or circle, of which there is an interminable number. You certainly get to know a man best and at his best in his own home, and you never get to know a wife and a mother out of that environment; for a woman is even more dependent than a man upon the sympathetic atmosphere that frames her. I should be, after my experience, and I am, the last person in the world to say that the Germans are not hospitable; but there is much less visiting even among themselves, and much less of constant reception of strangers in their homes, than with us. Habit, lack of wealth, lack of trained servants, and a certain proud shyness, and in some cases indifference and a lack of vitality which welcomes the trouble of being host, account for this. No doubt, too, the old habit of economy remains even when there is no longer the same necessity for it, and saving and gayety do not go well together. In Geldsachen hurt die Gemuethlichkeit auf. I should be sorry to spoil my picture by the overemphasis of details. The reader will not see what I have intended to paint, if he gets only an impression of caution, of economy, of sordidness and fatigue. No nation that gives birth to an untranslatable word like Gemuethlichkeit can be without that characteristic. The English words "home" and "comfort," the French word "esprit," and the German word Gemuethlichkeit have no exact equivalents in other languages. This in itself is a sure sign of a quality in the nation which bred the word. The difficulty lies in the fact that another language is another life. The Germans are not cheerful as we are cheerful; they are not happy as we are happy; they are not free as we are free; they are not polite as we are polite; they are not contented as we are contented; and no one for a moment who is even an amateur observer and an amateur philologist combined would claim that the three words, love and amour and Liebe mean the same thing. No word in the English language is used so often from the pulpit as the word love, but this cannot be said of the use of amour in France or of Liebe in Germany. Nations pour themselves into the tiny moulds of words and give us statuettes of themselves. The Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the Teuton have filled these three words with a certain vague philosophy of themselves, a hazy composite photograph of themselves. No one writer or painter, no one incident, no one tragedy, no one day or year of history has done this. To us, love is the coldest, cleanest, as it is perhaps the most loyal of the three. L'amour sounds to us seductive, enticing, often indeed little more than lust embroidered to make a cloak for ennui. Liebe is to us friendly, soft, childlike.