s suffered torments in
London because he had to sit down to certain meals at certain hours
instead of eating anything he fancied at any time he felt hungry, and
I suppose it is only your British _Heuchelei_ that leads you to smile
politely instead of adding, "As the beasts of the field do." But I am
always mazed, as the Cornish say, when Germans talk of their freedom
from convention. In Hamburg I was once seriously rebuked by an old
friend for carrying a book through the streets that was not wrapped up
in paper. In Hamburg that is one of the things people don't do. In
Mainz and in many other German towns there are certain streets where
one side, for reasons no one can explain, is taboo at certain hours of
the day; not of the night, but of the day. You may go to a music shop
at midday to buy a sonata, and find, if you are a girl, that you have
committed a crime. The intercourse between young people outside their
homes is hedged round with convention. German titles of address are so
absurdly formal that Germans laugh at them themselves. Their
ceremonies in connection with anniversaries and family events bristle
with convention, and offer pitfalls at every step to the stranger or
the blunderer. It is true that men do not dress for dinner every day,
and wax indignant over the necessity of doing so for the theatre in
England; but there are various occasions when they wear evening dress
in broad daylight, and an Englishman considers that an uncomfortable
convention. The truth is, that these questions of comfort and
ceremonial are not questions that should be discussed in the hostile
dogmatic tone adopted in both countries by those who only know their
own. The ceremonies that are foreign to you impress you, while those
you have been used to all your life have become a second nature. An
Englishwoman feels downright uncomfortable in her high stuff gown at
night, and a German lady brought up at one of the great German Courts
told me that when she stayed in an English country house and put on
what she called a ball dress for dinner every night, she felt like a
fool.

To come back to questions of expenditure so intimately related to
questions of comfort, it must be remembered that in an English
household there are two dinners a day: one early for the servants and
children, and one late for the grown-ups; and solid dinners cost money
even in England, where at present there is no meat famine. When
Germans dine late they don't also d