She was right about the mice. They put a veto on the Semmering excursion. It was absolutely impossible, he said, to leave the delicate creatures for a whole twenty-four hours. If they were not fed regularly, the whole value of the experiments conducted on them would be destroyed. Could not, I suggested, somebody else feed them for once? He said there was nobody else on the premises on a Sunday. I asked who fed them while he had been away, and he said: "Some of the other men, but it would be impossible for them to do it on a Sunday." And so the mountains of the Semmering lay beyond our reach--barred from us by mice. In the meantime there were the evenings. He couldn't, he said, however hard he tried, take time off during the day-time. Perhaps, if he hadn't been ill, he might have stolen a day, but as it was .... And so, with a regretful smile, he left me every morning to spend the warm and sunny hours as best I could, lounging about the cafés and boulevards, and occasionally, when such a busy person could spare me a moment, gossiping with Mizzi. Her accent was certainly atrocious, but her knowledge of English idiom and grammar surprised me by its completeness. It was only quite accidentally that I learned that Terry had taught her. There comes to me now, as I write, the memory of a remark made years afterwards by someone who looked at Terry from a different angle. "Leave him alone with somebody," was this remark, "and in a quarter of an hour he'll either have said nothing at all, or else he'll have begun to teach. He loves teaching because he loves giving more than taking away, and teaching is _that_." I wasn't, even at the time, surprised that he had taught Mizzi. It seemed natural, since she had wanted to learn English and he had wanted to learn German. She told me that English was her third foreign language--French and Italian being already known to her. I asked her once why she was so keen to be a linguist. I was standing in the porch, smoking my after-breakfast cigar in the sunlight, and Mizzi's hands, everlastingly busy, were tending the flowers in the ground-floor window-boxes. She said, with a little shrug of her shoulders: "It will be very useful to me--someday...." And then, as if she had suddenly made up her mind that I could be trusted, she added: "I tell you this in confidence. Some day, when I haf the money, I shall buy all the houses along here and make them into one big hotel.... And then I will haf an omnibus at the station, and I will talk to English and French and Italian in their own language, so that it will all be very--what do you say?--_heimlich_...." XII