"We are interesting, yes!" blandly agreed von Herrnung. He lighted a fresh cigarette, balanced his magnificent person upon an inlaid Oriental chess-stool, folded his huge arms upon his broad breast, and turned upon Trixie and the impressionable Cynthia the batteries of his superb blue eyes. "_Es mag wohl sein_—it may possibly be because the Englishman is a human machine—a cold and formal, if intelligent being; while the German is a child of Nature, whatever his calling may be. His bounding pulses throb under the official or military uniform as though it were a fawn-skin worn by a young satyr. He can sing. He can revel. He can enjoy. He can love——" "He can love! Now you’re getting really quite too interesting!" Mrs. Charterhouse exclaimed in seeming ecstasy: "Do go on, Count. Pray, pray tell us how German officers love!" "Yet this exuberance, and seeming-careless child-likeness," pursued von Herrnung, "co-exists in the representative male of our glorious German nation with an energy which is pitilessly indomitable, and a hardness like that of diamond, or of the metal of the Hammer of Thor. Scratch the child, joyous and voluptuous"—the ladies nodded to each other delightedly at this second reference to voluptuousness—"you will find beneath its rosy skin the German Superman. _Gnädige Gräfin_, may I give you a cigarette?" He pulled out a massive silver-gilt case, and offered it to Lady Wastwood, who had thrown away the end of a tiny Péra. "Thanks," said the lady, "but it might turn out a super-cigarette and disagree with me. How astonishingly well-informed you Germans are upon the subject of yourselves! I’ve met heaps of your countrymen whom the subject seemed perfectly to obsess. I suppose they begin to teach you at a very early age, don’t they? Don’t you suppose they would, Cynthia dear?" Mrs. Charterhouse agreed. "Of course. But I wonder if that sort of—might one call it—intensive culture?—can be good for you?" With her charming head on one side she regarded von Herrnung pensively. "Don’t you _sometimes_ get fed up with yourselves? One would somehow suppose you would! Like the East End Board School children whose mother had to write to the Fifth Standard teacher to ask her not to tell Hemma and ’Arriet any more nasty things about their insides." Courtley and Lady Beauvayse, who under cover of a separate conversation had been listening, were seized with simultaneous attacks of coughing, rose and escaped from the smoking-room. Patrine Saxham remained, seeming to study the newspaper she had picked up. But only a confused jumble of letters, big and little, danced up and down the columns she held before her eyes.