son for
collarless blouses, bastard tartans, and white cotton gloves with
thumbs but no fingers. In England the force of custom drives women to
uncover their necks in the evening, whether it becomes them or not,
and it is not a custom for which sensible elderly women can have much
to say. But pneumonia blouses have never been universal wear in any
country, and it is impossible to explain their apparently irresistible
attraction for all ages and sizes of women in the Berlin electric
cars. Those who were not wearing pneumonia blouses a year ago were
wearing _Reform-Kleider_, shapeless ill-cut garments usually of grey
tweed. The oddest combination, and quite a common one, was a sack-like
_Reform-Kleid_, with a saucy little coloured bolero worn over it,
fingerless gloves, and a madly tilted beflowered hat perched on a
dowdy coiffure. These are rude remarks to make about the looks of
foreign ladies, but the _Reform-Kleid_ is just as hideous and absurd
in Germany now as our bilious green draperies were on the wrong people
twenty-five years ago, and I am sure every foreigner who came to
England must have laughed at them. On the whole, I would say of German
women in general what a Frenchwoman once said to me in the most
matter-of-fact tone of Englishwomen, _Elles s'habillent si mal_.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Probably private charities.

CHAPTER XVIII

HOSPITALITY

If a German cannot afford to ask you to dinner he asks you to supper,
and makes his supper inviting. At least, he does if he is sensible,
and if he lives where an inexpensive form of entertainment is in
vogue. But even in Germany people are not sensible everywhere. The
headmaster of a school in a small East Prussian town told me that his
colleagues, the higher officials and other persons of local
importance, felt bound to entertain their friends at least once a
year, and that their way was to invite everyone together to a dinner
given at the chief hotel in the town; and that to do this a family
would stint itself for months beforehand. He spoke with knowledge, so
I record what he said; but I have never been amongst Germans who were
hospitable in this painful way. Hotels are used for large
entertainments, just as they are in England, but most people receive
their friends in their homes, and only hire servants for some special
function, like a wedding or a public dinner.

The form of hospitality most popular in England now, the visit of two
or three days' durat