They were really very miserable and lonely and disillusioned. When we were Seniors there came a wonderful offer from Germany: a very high Government position for Professor Behrens. I heard them discussing this with a certain indecision which I had never heard in their remarks before. They knew very well what was before them in Germany. But, oh, what was about them here! The very servant problem alone made it impossible for civilized beings to organize a livable existence in America. Not to speak of a thousand other, raw, unfinished edges which rasped and fretted them at every turn. They finally decided to go, but their packing-up was conducted in a very different spirit from the first one I had seen. They had begun to divine that there was, in this business of looking for the ideal country, something more than meets the eye. I happened to visit them a few years after this, just before I was married, and found them much dissatisfied with European life. Mrs. Behrens was nettled and fretted by the question of social precedence which was, so it seemed to her, constantly used to humiliate her; and the children were stifling in the restricted, fenced-in, tyrannically regulated corner of life which was theirs. Julie took me off for a long walk one afternoon and told me something of her opinion of European young men, especially the officers whom for the most part she met in society, as they were the ones who had most leisure for afternoon and evening parties. “I can just tell you one thing,” she said with a grim accent and a hardset jaw, “I’ll never marry a European, if I die an old maid!” But later on, when her mother and she were exchanging reminiscences about the difficulties of American housekeeping, Julie cried out, “Oh, I couldn’t keep house in a country where there is no servant class!” Mrs. Behrens sighed, “Yes, I know, but just remember the bath-rooms, and the vacuum cleaners, and the hot water.” It seemed to me, as I looked about on their much traveled chairs and tables that I saw them patiently making ready for another journey. INHERITANCE