On the whole, then, the celebrated picture of the _Backfisch_, though it is overloaded, bears some relation to the facts of life in Germany: not only in the episodes that make the early chapters entertaining, but all through the story in atmosphere, in the little touches that give a story nationality. When the excellent Gretchen has been civilised she spends a great deal of time in the kitchen, and soon knows all the duties of the complete housekeeper; while, when the frivolous Eugenie becomes _Braut_ she cannot cook at all. But frivolous as she is, she recognises that marriage is unthinkable without cooking, and straightway sets to work to learn. Then, too, the _Backfisch_ is the ideal German maiden, cheerful, docile, and facetious; and constantly on the jump (_springen_ is the word she uses) to serve her elders. Middle-aged Germans used to have a most tiresome way of expecting girls to be like lambs in spring, always in the mood to frisk and caper: so that a quiet or a delicate girl had a bad time with some of them. _Ein junges Mädchen muss immer heiter sein_, they would say reproachfully. But it does not follow that you are always _heiter_ just because you are not twenty yet; especially in Germany, where girls are often anæmic and have headaches. However, perhaps the modern German maiden does not allow her elders to be so silly. There are some other ways, too, in which my _Backfisch_ of thirty years ago is typical of German womanhood both then and now. She is as good as gold, she is devoted to duty not to pleasure, and she is as guileless as a child. You know that when she marries she will be faithful unto death; you know that her husband and her children will call her blessed. These things come out quite naturally, almost unconsciously, in the little story that is "not literature," and which for all that is so truly and deeply German in its quality and tone. This Gretchen of the schoolroom, this caricature of the country cousin, is akin in her simplicity, sweetness, and depth of nature to that other Gretchen whose figure lives for ever in the greatest of German poems. Just as the women of Shakespeare and the women of Miss Austen are subtly kin to each other, inasmuch as they are English women, so Goethe's girl and the girl of the poor little schoolroom story are German in every pulse and fibre. And this national essence, the honesty, goodness, and sweetness of the girl, are the real things, the things to remember about her. Those little matters of the toilet and the table will soon be out of date, are out of date already in the greater part of Germany. As a picture of forgotten manners they will always be amusing, just as it is amusing to read an eighteenth-century English story of school life, in which the young ladies fought and bit and scratched each other and were whipped and sent to bed. CHAPTER VI THE STUDENT