The German girl, then, is not always the simple creature tradition paints her. At any rate she reads novels and sees plays that would have been forbidden to her mother. Nevertheless she is as a rule just as happy as a girl should be when the man of her dreams asks her to marry him. In other days a proposal of marriage was a ceremonial in Germany. A man had to put on evening dress for the occasion, and carry a bouquet with him. "Oh yes," said a German friend of mine, "this is still done sometimes. A little while ago a cousin of mine in Mainz was seen coming home in evening dress by broad daylight carrying his bouquet. The poor fellow had been refused." But in these laxer times a man is spared such an ordeal. It is more usual in Germany than in England to speak to a girl's father before proposing to her, but even this is not invariable nowadays. Young people make their own opportunities. "Last year my brother proposed to his present wife in the woods near Baden while they gathered Waldmeister," said a young German to a girl he ardently admired. "It will be in flower next week, and your parents have just arranged that I may meet them at the _Alte Schloss_ in time for dinner. After dinner we will walk in the woods--_nicht wahr_?" But the girl, as it happened, did not wish to receive a proposal of marriage from this young man, so she took care not to walk in the woods and gather Waldmeister with him. It is often said that the sexes herd separately in Germany, and do not meet each other much. But this always seems to me one of the things said by people who have looked at Germans and not lived amongst them. A nation that has such an intimate home life, and is on the whole poor, receives its friends in an intimate informal way. Young men have different occupations and interests from girls, but when they are admitted to a family they are often admitted on terms of easy friendship. In London you may ask a young man with others to dinner at intervals, and never get to know him; in Berlin you ask him without others to supper, and soon get to know him very well. Besides, a German cannot endure life long without an _Ausflug_ or a _Landpartie_, and when the family plans one it includes one or two of its friends.