the day; not of the night, but of the day. You may go to a music shop at midday to buy a sonata, and find, if you are a girl, that you have committed a crime. The intercourse between young people outside their homes is hedged round with convention. German titles of address are so absurdly formal that Germans laugh at them themselves. Their ceremonies in connection with anniversaries and family events bristle with convention, and offer pitfalls at every step to the stranger or the blunderer. It is true that men do not dress for dinner every day, and wax indignant over the necessity of doing so for the theatre in England; but there are various occasions when they wear evening dress in broad daylight, and an Englishman considers that an uncomfortable convention. The truth is, that these questions of comfort and ceremonial are not questions that should be discussed in the hostile dogmatic tone adopted in both countries by those who only know their own. The ceremonies that are foreign to you impress you, while those you have been used to all your life have become a second nature. An Englishwoman feels downright uncomfortable in her high stuff gown at night, and a German lady brought up at one of the great German Courts told me that when she stayed in an English country house and put on what she called a ball dress for dinner every night, she felt like a fool. To come back to questions of expenditure so intimately related to questions of comfort, it must be remembered that in an English household there are two dinners a day: one early for the servants and children, and one late for the grown-ups; and solid dinners cost money even in England, where at present there is no meat famine. When Germans dine late they don't also dine early, even where there are children; while the kitchen dinner, that meal of supreme importance here, is eaten when the family has finished theirs, and is as informal as the meal a bird makes of berries. In a German household, living on a small income, nothing is wasted,--not fuel, not food, not cleaning materials, as far as possible not time. The _tüchtige Hausfrau_ would be made miserable by having to pay and feed a woman who put on gala clothes at midday, and did no work to soil them after that. "Two girls," I once heard a German say to an Englishwoman who had just described her own modest household which she ran, she said, with two maids. "Two girls ... for you and your husband. But what, I ask you, does the second one do?" "She cleans the rooms and waits at table and opens the door," said the Englishwoman. "All that can one girl do just as well. I assure you it is so. There cannot possibly be work in your household for two girls. You have told me how quietly you live, and I know what English cooking is, if you can call it cooking." "You see, there must be someone to open the door." "Why could one girl not answer the door, ... unless she was washing. Then you would naturally go yourself."