“Why not?” asked Eileen. “I’m Irish, but I love England, in spite of all her faults, and all my grievances! Who can help loving England that has lived with her people?” This Lieutenant von Kreuzenach was two months in Lille before he spoke a word with Eileen. She passed him often in the courtyard and always he saluted her with great deference. She fancied she noticed a kind of wistfulness in his eyes, as though he would have liked to talk to her. He had blue eyes, sad sometimes, she noticed, and a clean-cut face, rather delicate and pale. One day she dropped a pile of books in the yard all of a heap, as he was passing, and he said, “Allow me,” and helped to pick them up. One of the books was “Puck of Pook’s Hill,” by Kipling, and he smiled as he turned over a page or two. “I love that book,” he said, in perfect English. “There’s so much of the spirit of old England in it. History, too. That’s fine about the Roman wall, where the officers go pig-sticking.” Eileen O’Connor asked him if he were half English--perhaps he had an English mother?--but he shook his head and said he was wholly German--_echt Deutsch_. He hesitated for a moment as though he wanted to continue the conversation, but then saluted and passed on. It was a week or so later when they met again, and it was Eileen O’Connor who said “Good morning” and made a remark about the weather. He stopped, and answered with a look of pleasure and boyish surprise. “It’s jolly to hear you say ‘Good morning’ in English. Takes me straight back to Oxford before this atrocious war. Besides----” Here he stopped and blushed. “Besides what?” asked Eileen. “Besides, it’s a long time since I talked to a lady. Among officers one hears nothing but war-talk--the last battle, the next battle, technical jargon, ‘shop,’ as the English say. It would be nice to talk about something else--art, music, poetry, ideas.” She chaffed him a little, irresistibly. “Oh, but you Germans have the monopoly of all that! Art, music, poetry, they are all absorbed into your _Kultur_--properly Germanised. As for ideas--what is not in German philosophy is not an idea.” He looked profoundly hurt, said Eileen. “Some Germans are very narrow, very stupid, like some English, perhaps. Not all of us believe that German _Kultur_ is the only knowledge in the world.” “Anyhow,” said Eileen O’Connor, “I’m Irish, so we needn’t argue about the difference between German and English philosophy.” He spoke as if quoting from a text-book. “The Irish are a very romantic race.” That, of course, had to be denied by Eileen, who knew her Bernard Shaw. “Don’t you believe it,” she said. “We’re a hard, logical, relentless people, like all peasant folk of Celtic stock. It’s the English who are romantic and sentimental, like the Germans.” He was amazed at those words (so Eileen told us) and then laughed heartily in his very boyish way. “You are pleased to make fun of me. You are pulling my leg, as we said at Oxford.”