Besides, I was talking of the feelings of our young girls in society at the time of my youth. To-day everything has changed greatly. The girl fresh from a good school no longer, as at that time, finds in the ball her highest joy and her only opportunity for fulfilling her vocation, a happy conquest. Dancing is being displaced by sport, and of callings that are open to women there are more every day. Society life itself has grown more tedious too: the young men shun the ballrooms; the seasons do not last so long that people get better and better acquainted and so enjoy each other’s company more and more; neither in winter in the city nor in summer at the watering-place does society meet for the whole season—they fly from place to place, from the mountains to the sea, from the northern city to the South, from Scheveningen to St. Moritz, from the Pyrenees to Egypt, up to the not distant time when from the Isle of Wight they will make excursions to the fashionable Japanese baths. VI A SEASON IN HOMBURG VOR DER HÖHE Our way of living · My first singing lessons · The Princess of Mingrelia · Tsar Alexander II · Adelina Patti 1864—that was the year in which the Austrian troops, in conjunction with the German, were waging war against Denmark. When I call up that year in my own memory, this event plays no part in it at all. Doubtless I must have heard something of it, but, as no one near and dear to me was participating in it, what I heard was too faint a tone to leave traces on my psychical phonograph. And in general the naïve conception of martial events which was then mine, and is doubtless widespread even to-day, is that wars are things that take place as necessarily and regularly and outside of the sphere of all human influence as do processes in the interior of the earth and in the firmament; so one is not to get into a rage over them. And if they take place at a distance it is like the collision of two stars—such a thing does not really concern one, one will not let himself be disturbed in his occupations and amusements by it—at most one may find it interesting that “history” has again become active, and may be anxious to see what new lines its stylus will engrave on the map. I do not think, for that matter, that I felt this anxiety. I did not read the political part of the papers when I read papers at all (my reading consisted only of French and English books); and if I learned of the victory of the allies, and took pleasure in it, this was at most brought about by the fact that the _Düppler-Schanzen-Marsch_ was to be seen in all the music shops, with the usual pretty picture of charging soldiers on the cover, one of them in the foreground at the left waving the flagstaff on high, while at the top the bunting rolls over the whole page in such great undulations that one positively hears it flap in the wind. The cover of that piece of