“I cannot believe that your work has been done as indifferently as you think. I believe you have always done what you could, and fought hard against feelings and every form of indolence or selfishness. Surely you could somehow raise some response to fun; only perhaps a good deal arises from your being English and they not understanding.” In spite of all, however, the trouble went deep, and she chronicles sadly in her diary that “neither moon nor stars for many days appeared.” Oddly enough, she never seems to have entertained the idea of simply giving in her resignation and going home. She entirely meant to serve her time,—nay more,—to hold the position until some suitable person was found to carry on her work. Certainly it was not the acquisition of the language that served as an inducement to remain, for, throughout her stay, she learned almost incredibly little. The whole of her very limited energy was thrown into her teaching. “The hearty praise pouring in for the girls’ progress, ought to comfort me there,” she says. “I suppose they almost certainly have got on more rapidly than with 9 teachers out of 10.” One is glad to learn that months before she left Mannheim, the tide of popularity turned; and, although even she attributed the change in great part to the fact of her having worn a “ravissant” gown at the School Carnival Ball (a gown which she had worn as a bridesmaid in England) she was glad to respond by expanding good spirits to the diminished pressure. So the pretty frock served its turn. “There’s no doubt about it that opinion altogether has veered round widely about me. I think I am rather popular now,—I certainly _was_ thoroughly the contrary.” She was, until the later years of her life, wanting in sympathy with the more or less innocent and pardonable vanities of youth, and yet during this period she did sometimes cry out for a more vivid life,—or rather for days and hours of greater vividness to break the monotony of the working life she had deliberately chosen. It was one of her ambitions to be duly presented to Queen Victoria, for whom throughout life she had a great admiration, but the ambition was never realized. “Darling,” writes her Mother, in answer to a very human cry, “your young bright days are nobly spent for the Lord. Shall we offer Him that which costs us nothing?... There always has been (though probably not necessarily) so much that is false, impure and hollow connected with most of what are termed amusements that you would soon loathe them, and feel work and even discipline more satisfying.” But never for one moment from her twentieth year onwards did S. J.-B. ask for amusement and vividness _in place of_ work and discipline.