"Do you call _that_ a collar?" he cried, twirling the limp strip round his fingers. "Do you call that piece of dish-clout a collar, I say?" "If your linen isn't starched to your liking, get it up yourself," the sister answered snappishly, and put the bellows in the fire under the iron-rest till smoke and cinders flew about the room. "It's a disgrace," Kurt said, "that a man should be compelled to interfere in such sordid household matters." "Why don't you earn money enough to keep a laundress of your own?" asked his sister. Instead of an answer, he threw the collar at her head, and she screamed out for help to her mother. She appeared on the scene in a white dressing-jacket, and her grizzled hair caught up with a celluloid comb. Three of the small fry trotted after her. She was already worried and irritable. "Can't you be quiet?" she stormed. "Father is busy with his sermon, and you are behaving like heathens." "Heathens," replied Kurt, "are at least in the happy position of not requiring clean linen, as they prefer to go naked." "Yes, you ungodly lout," cried his mother, whose admiration for him had long ago ebbed. "You are a precious, good-for-nothing----" "You are a lout. A lout you are," he trolled forth, mimicking her. "A lout. Ha, ha!" The harassed mother began to cry for vexation, and the little ones following her example, the Sunday morning concert of praise was in full swing. Meanwhile, Pastor Brenckenberg, suffering from severe headache, sat brooding over a bulky book of sermons at the half-cleared breakfast-table in the parlour. He was a corpulent man of over sixty, tall, with massive shoulders and a red, coarse neck. He wore his thin, much-greased hair parted in the middle and combed smoothly behind his ears, so that it framed his big, bloated face with locks like those with which Christ is depicted in sacred art. In spite of the hanging cheeks and moist, protruding, sensual lips, there was an expression of power and strength about his countenance which inspired a certain reverence and respect. Twenty-two years before, the old Squire Sellenthin had appointed him tutor and bear-leader to his wild, unmanageable son Leo, though he might be thought hardly suitable for the post, his drinking-bouts as a student having been the talk of the country-side. But the keen insight into character of the old man of the world had not been at fault in this instance. The new private tutor ruled with a rod of iron, and at the same time made himself invaluable as a perpetrator of dry jokes and an indefatigable boon companion.