I SPENT the summer at home, riding, rowing, sailing, and swimming. The yacht I had brought over to Malmoe where I went by train whenever I wanted to use it. Perhaps I became over-bold as a sailor. Repeatedly I crossed the Baltic at night; or ran up the Swedish coast, to Blekinge, Stockholm, Gefle, or Haparanda. Occasionally I had a companion or two; but I do not remember them. Mostly I was alone. It would have been a fine opportunity thoroughly to learn the language of the country whose diplomatic representative my father wanted me to be one day; but I did not grasp it. It was so much easier for me to speak French, German or English; and in that I was aided by the almost universal dispersion of these languages in those regions.
     My father, I soon discovered, had become a reader. He now spent most of his time in the library of Thurow, though, on occasion, he would still go about on horseback. Once or twice he even went away on sudden trips to London or Paris. But, chiefly, I got used to finding him ensconced in one of the huge leather arm-chairs of the library, reading in the Encyclopedia Britannica or in Brockhaus' Lexicon. To my vast surprise he asked me one day to help him construe certain passages in the Roman elegiac poets. I gave him the help he required, and, the author he asked me about being Ovid, looked at the title page: it was a fine edition of the Ars Amatoria! I began to read Ovid myself; so far he had been to me only the author of the Metamorphoses. A world opened

up before my eyes. It was my first contact with erotic literature; and while my interest, for the time being, remained entirely Platonic, it was a revelation.
     Casually, one day, I mentioned to my father that my only conflict with my mother had been over the question of my changing over from the Realschule to the gymnasium.
     "You would still like to do that ?" he asked.
     "I believe I should," I replied. "But I've never had any real grounding in Greek. It would seem to be too late now?"
     "Why too late?"
     "Well," I said, "I suppose they are too far ahead of me. I have only one year left, the Oberprima. I don't think they'd admit me in the gymnasium."
     "Nonsense," he said. "Of course I want you to go to the gymnasium, not to any of these new-fangled schools of Bismarck's."
     "How about the Greek?"
     "Ah," he said airily, "you'd pick that up in no time." It was amazing to me how far here, at Thurow, that whole question which, while my mother lived, had seemed so vital could have receded into the background. Scholarship, even scholarly ambitions, even the ambition to write seemed pale and far-away. What did it all matter so long as there were woods to ride through and seas to sail upon? What mattered was life, not knowledge. I was in love with Thurow; and I wondered to what extent my mother's Cassandra-warnings were founded on fact.
     One night I broached that subject. Of my sisters only four were alive now, none of the younger: and these four were dispersed in distant parts of the world; they were strangers to me.

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     "I suppose," I said, "I shall one day own Thurow?" My father who was reading looked up. "What was that?" he asked.
     I repeated my question.
     "Well, yes," he said, "such as it is."
     "Whatever that may mean," I said flippantly, but with my heart pounding.
     "It means that the place is mortgaged. Heavily, too." And for the first time he referred to my mother. "You see, your mother's going away as she did left me without money to carry on. The place has never paid. It's kept itself, in the past. But it isn't doing so any longer. If I were a younger man, I'd let the nurseries go to the devil; I'd seed them to grass and raise cattle for export. There's a great market for cattle in England and Germany. Across the water" - meaning in Denmark - "they're getting rich raising cattle. Why do you ask?"
     "I was wondering. I sometimes think I'd like to farm."
     He laughed. "No money in it," he said, "unless you have money to start with. Money breeds money. You go after your diplomatic career and keep the place as a retreat to go to from time to time. Leave Niels in charge. He's a good man. That is, provided you get it." And he laughed again, enigmatically.
     'At last he unfolded his plan to me. Since the last two years of my schooling had been spent in Germany, he thought it best for me to return there for my final year. There was, in the city of Hamburg, a gymnasium which enjoyed a European reputation. I have never returned there, and so I have forgotten its name. Graduation from that school would ensure me a high standing for the

first year in any university. There, then, he would take me, placing me in a boarding-house. I could make use of my boat there, too.
     Thus the summer came and went. I felt that, at least for the next few years, my life was settled. As the time for the opening of the term approached, I gradually worked myself back into my old enthusiasms, though they never again reached the same high pitch of a year ago when they had been opposed. Partly at least, the reason for that lay in the fact that I was beginning to distinguish between life and knowledge about life. Of the former I had a taste in frequent calls at the places of our neighbours where, I found, I was eagerly welcomed. My father still had the reputation of being a wealthy man; I suppose I was being looked upon as a desirable son-in-law, I was a fair tennis-player, a good rider, and a swimmer of remarkable endurance; I had entirely overcome the sickliness of my childhood; my figure was dashing, especially on horseback; my only disability, partial deafness, did not yet give any serious trouble. Above all, I had travelled widely and could talk entertainingly of foreign parts. I was at the age where a boy begins to pay attention to the other sex; and there were bevies of charming girls available in the neighbourhood; most of our neighbours had more girls than boys. All the more prominent ones lived quiet, dignified lives such as result from the long-continued and unquestioned possession of fine estates and means sufficient to keep them up. I doubt whether many of them were making economic progress; but they lived in security and contentment. There was a good deal in that sort of existence to captivate me. I was, however, still too young to be sure of myself.

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     When the fall came, I paid a number of farewell calls; and one day my father and I took train for Hamburg. It was perhaps the first time that, for a railway journey, he did not order a private car.
     For the duration of my father's stay we lived at a hotel, of course; but he enquired at once, from the porter of that institution, for a boarding-house. He found one, not too far from the school, yet in a residential district. It was a large, flashy place, conducted by a woman of the world who, by her lavish and tolerant ways, attracted an international clientele - commercial, not diplomatic.
     Next, my father went to see the Director of the gymnasium who made for me an appointment with the senior master of Greek. Early one afternoon I called on this man at his house. In a brief examination, oral as well as written, I secured exactly what I had expected: a pass, and even a good pass, in reading, translation, and history of literature; but a miserable failure in grammar and composition: it was the only failure ever registered against me in any academic examination. However, after some hesitation and consultation, I was tentatively admitted to the final year.
     "Well," said my father, "that's that. Now it's up to you, my boy."
     And he promptly departed.
     I might say right here that, by dint of reasonably hard work, I succeeded in justifying the confidence placed in me. Before the end of the fall term I was leading the class even in Greek; I had a natural gift for languages. In all other subjects I was ahead of my class from the start, thanks to my travels and the excellent coaching received from Herr Niemoeller. At the end of the year I passed

my final examinations with high honours and, thus, was ready for the university.
     What needs to detain us here is another matter; and it came into prominence by reason of the choice my father had made of a boarding-house.
     I soon found out that it was a highly fashionable place. There were some twenty or twenty-five more or less permanent boarders; and they were looked after by a competent staff of five or six servants. With one exception, they were males between the ages of twenty and forty.
     The one exception consisted of a Colombian family: husband, wife, one son, and one daughter. They occupied the best suite in the house. The husband was a small, insignificant man of German extraction, a mining engineer on a year's leave, a great admirer of his native country. His wife was a magnificent Creole of pure, Spanish blood who made a profound impression on me. She was enormous in girth and excessively lazy; but in spite of that I considered her a great beauty. What impressed me most in her was the pure-white transparency of her skin, of a velvety texture, which incongruously admitted of an occasional deep-carmine blush. Her hands and feet were, in comparison with her body, of extraordinarily exiguous size; and she was always heavily jewelled. These people kept a man-servant of mixed negro and Indian blood and their own carriage. Both son and daughter partook of the father's physical insignificance. They were always late at table; which was of some importance to me inasmuch as, in spite of the woman' s inability to speak or understand German, Swedish, or English, the conversation around the board

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always ceased or at least flowed in innocuous channels when they appeared in the door of the dining-room.
     In addition, there were, on special occasions - for instance those of the great regattas or the horse-races, -many transients referred to the place by those magnates wrongly called "Porters" who looked after the outside interests of the guests at the great hotels surounding the inner basin of the Alster. When those hotels were filled up, the overflow was directed to this boarding-house. As far as I have ever been able to verify, there was no language which these Porters were not able to speak as well as the travellers. I believe this influential office to be a specifically German institution.
     The permanent male boarders, I soon found out, were all apparently wealthy and possessed of unlimited leisure. In addition, they were fast livers, it seemed that many houses of business in the city ship brokers' and export houses - had adopted the same system which, to the time of his accident, my father had followed at home, namely that of keeping young "volunteers" who, without pay, looked after a considerable part of the foreign correspondence, in return for their being initiated into the mysteries of international trade. To judge by the samples whom I met at this boarding-house, such volunteers were not required to be at their places of business before ten or after three o'clock. All of these young men were foreigners, a majority, I believe, coming from South America, though there were at least one Swede and two or three Englishmen. A few looked outright exotic; but they were fashionable and fast for all that.
     If I can trust my memory, there was not one who was not addicted to the copious use of alcohol in its less diluted forms; and, so it seemed, not one had any aim in life more

serious than that of the unremitting chase after women of a certain type. That much I concluded from what I heard of their conversations; it is amazing to me how much I remember of them. The topic was new to me; and, naturally, I kept my ears open.
     I have already said that I was at a highly impressionable age; I was in my puberty. Being by far the youngest, I observed a discreet silence; and they paid no attention to my presence. Today it is a miracle to me that I did not become entirely corrupted in mind or ruined in health. From what I heard in the dining- and living-rooms of that huge and pretentious place, I soon came to know the topography of what, in America, would have been called the red-light district of the city; and I considered these men who were so familiar with it as bold and buccaneering braves, much to be admired for their daring spirit. So far, however, I had no practical use for the knowledge which I nevertheless imbibed eagerly.
     Fortunately, there was little leisure. The teachers of the school, of whom I still think with gratitude and even veneration, took a special interest in my welfare; two or three of them helped me by giving me an extra hour now and then. One, a well-known mathematician, with translations of whose works I have since met in secondhand book-shops in New York and San Francisco, knowing perhaps of the dangers to which I, alone in this great city, must be exposed, asked me to help him, in return for such coaching as he gave me in Greek, to read the proofs of certain nautical tables which he was publishing. Another put me through my paces in declensions and conjugations. A third read with me Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato and Aristotle - far in advance of the curriculum of the school. All of which

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helped to rekindle ancient fires - ancient I say, for at that age a year is equivalent to decades of a later phase.
     Yet there must still have been hours which remained unoccupied. I see myself roaming through the streets whose names figured in the conversations of my more sophisticated fellow-boarders. I learned later that the city, at the time, was famous for the luxurious lavishness with which it catered to what is commonly called vice. It was not the crude night-life of Berlin; in some ways it rather resembled that of Paris. From what I learned, there were certain establishments of entertainment which were quite exclusive, and to which one had to have an introduction, as to one's tailor, if desirous of being admitted as a familiar.
     From that moment on I broke off the only purely social connection I had - that with Uncle Jacobsen. I knew, of course, that my father, to whom, willy-nilly, I had handed myself over, glad to be rid at any price of the drudgery of tutoring, would have discouraged that connection in any cage. Uncle Jacobsen had been mentioned between us only once, a day or two after my mother's funeral which he had attended without descending at Castle Thurow. He had merely followed the hearse to the cemetery. That single occasion had been sufficient to make me divine that there was no friendship lost between the two men. Yet, no sooner had my father left me alone at Hamburg, than I had called on Uncle Jacobsen.
     He had a comparatively small but exquisitely furnished house in a very patrician district west of the Alster. There, he was looked after by two or three liveried men-servants and a middle-aged lady who acted as housekeeper. I soon found that he had more than one hobby,

besides athletics. For the latter, his basement was fitted out as a "Turn-Stube" - a gymnasium in the English sense of the word. But he, too, was no longer a young man, though he was probably my father's junior by some ten years. One after the other he had had to give up his favourite exercises and sports; even sailing; he had recently acquired, instead, a steam-yacht manned by a crew of four or five. In that craft he took me, during the first week-ends, down the river Elbe, to Blankenese, Brunsbuettel, Heligoland, and Cuxhaven. Of his other hobbies, I remember distinctly only one, that of collecting "kris" and other native weapons from the East Indies where he had relatives in the Dutch settlements. This was to be of some slight importance to me a year or so later when I spent three months with a cousin of his on the island of Java. Uncle Jacobsen had his place of business at the waterfront where the big liners were anchored in the road-stead and the huge freighters moored to the quays. It was housed in a huge ramshackle building without the least pretension to magnificence or even modernity.
     Uncle Jacobsen knew, of course, what my father's attitude to him was; and I believe he was reluctant, now that my mother was dead, to become too intimate with me. There was nothing between us of our old camaraderie. Physically, he was much changed; he had grown a beard; his hair was white; and the smoothness and transparency of the skin of his face was almost incredible; as was the gentleness of his manner. He was very kind to me; but he was reserved. I believe he had formed a new attachment, for more than once I found a lady of perhaps forty at his house. She, too, was kind, but in an ironical, condescending way which served to keep me

at a distance. Nevertheless, throughout the fall I continued to go there at least once a week, till, as I have said, I began to roam certain streets at night, under the influence of the table-talk at the boarding-house hence-forward an inexplicable feeling caused me to keep away.
     In those districts of the city of which I am speaking, the windows of the houses were always shuttered; the doors were closed and even locked; at least so it seemed; and over all these streets lay an air of mystery and allurement which, to me, was at once thrilling and tormenting.
     One evening, though, in the dusk of a short winter day, I saw, across the driveway of one of them, a door which stood open. I remember the occasion with unusual vividness. I was walking along, skirting a high wall which must have enclosed a park or a cemetery. For a moment, at the sight of the open door, I stood rooted to the spot; then, weak-kneed with excitement, I went over to the opposite side.
     In line with the open door a wide stairway led to an upper storey, at right angles to the line of my vision; and this stairway was being ascended just then by an amply-proportioned young woman clad in nothing but her underwear, a silken dressing-gown hanging over her left arm. With the right she grasped the stair-rail.
     As though she had divined my presence down there, in the street where the last grey light of the waning day was struggling against the yellow radiance of the street-lamps, she, herself flooded by gas-light from above - as, indeed, was the whole well of the staircase - espying me, bent over the railing, at the very moment when she was about to disappear above the ceiling of the hail, gave me a wonderful smile and threw me a kiss, laughing,

no doubt at the realization that I was a mere boy inclined to see in her something between an angel and a fiend.
     At that moment an unseen hand abruptly closed the outer door through which I was staring upward.
     I had, of course, not the slightest idea of what had happened to me; I felt as if a tingling wave of life and experience had broken over me and, as it ebbed away, had left me changed. At the same time I felt weighed down by a crushing, leaden burden of guilt. To this day it seems to me to have been one of the most irrational things that could happen to a youth. For several minutes I must have stood there, staring at the door. When I turned away at last, I felt a rebel as well as the recipient of a revelation. For weeks thereafter I chose the same hour for roaming the same street, passing up and down along the blank wall of the park or the cemetery, up and down; but never again did I see a door open. This was a relief as well as a disappointment; for the young man, still "unsullied", fears as much as he desires his initiation.
     The initiation, however, was to come before my year at Hamburg was out. It happened as follows.
     Most of my teachers were distinguished men who kept their distance from their pupils; and though, as I have said, some of them helped me, they carefully avoided anything like intimacy or even social contacts.
     It was different with one of them, Dr. Broegler, the teacher of chemistry. In this school, science was a minor subject; and its teachers, I verily believe, were looked down upon by those who taught the classics. I am sure they, as well as the teachers of moderns, were less carefully selected; they changed more often. Dr. Broegler was also much younger than most of the others; he was

probably still in his thirties. It was not long before he found out that I, coming as I did from a Realschule, knew a great deal more chemistry than was required in this school; but, in spite of the fact that the chemistry lessons, being laboratory lessons, came at the end of the school day, I could, according to the regulations, not be dismissed; the discipline of the school was cloistral. So he began to make use of me as a laboratory assistant. Since he found it difficult to keep his classes in order, this was of real help to him; he could remain on the podium and keep his eyes on the disturbers. Soon he and I were almost like equals. Though the custom was that the senior pupils be called by their family names and given the formal "Sie", he began to call me "Phil" and "Du"; and he told me to drop, except in the presence of the classes, the obligatory "Herr Doctor".
     Often, when we were getting things ready for the experimental two hours - once a week - I sacrificing my recess to help him, he talked of a laboratory which he had at his house and which he must show me one day: in his spare time he was working on a then new process of extracting nitrogen from the air.
     One Saturday, he asked me to come out with him after school and to stay with him, at his house, till Sunday. I must mention the incidental effect this association was to have later on my intellectual development: I became an assiduous reader of all things new in science; even today I try to keep up with developments. For the moment, however, other effects overshadowed this one.
     Since he lived at Blankenese (the "White Nose" or cape), we had to go by train or boat; for that village of summer houses, situated on a hilly promontory jutting far into the great river, lay several miles down the Elbe,

below Altona, the sister city of Hamburg, famous for its pleasure district, St. Pauli, among sailors from all over the world.
     To my immense surprise, I found at his house, which was a small villa, that the young wife of this somewhat untidy and careless man who was entirely absorbed in his research work was an extraordinarily pretty, almost fragile woman with at least an admixture of Jewish blood.
     I also found that Dr. Broegler was addicted to the use of wine which he took outside the house; it is true, he never indulged to any extent except on Saturday nights when, at nine or ten in the evening, he invariably went to a nearby tavern whence he rarely returned before the small hours of the night. I divined that his wife, being much left alone - as a result of train schedules, her husband had to be away from half-past seven in the morning till six or six-thirty at night - and being, besides, socially isolated in this suburb of pretentious summer-homes, was, to say the least, not happy, in spite of her gay, light disposition. I liked Dr. Broegler, though I laughed at him; but I was quite mature enough to see that this fanatical worker was the last man to give this woman what she craved. He was dark-haired, with a low forehead which was always furrowed and a short, bristling moustache; and he was utterly indifferent to his appearance. She loved pretty clothes, frivolous music and, above all, well-dressed crowds. I could not understand how these two people came to be married.
     My first visit to the house took place late in the year; and soon after it I went home for Christmas. When, after the New Year, I returned to school, I was asked again, this time in the name of Mrs. Broegler. We arrived at the house in a snow-storm; and, perhaps partly

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on that account, or on account of the contrast, I seemed at once to be aware of a change in the atmosphere of the place; everything looked festive and brilliant; Mrs. Broegler was dressed in an evening frock. The meal over, she went almost at once to the piano and began to play: the gay tunes of the day, Strauss and Offenbach. I had to go with her husband to the laboratory at the back of the house, on which he probably spent more money than on his wife. But at the usual hour he grew restless; the tavern was calling him; and this time, when he was ready to slip away without seeing his wife again, he said a revealing thing. "Amuse her, will you? You'll help me immensely."
     It was not the only time in my life that almost the identical thing was to happen to me. Husbands who, in a certain kind of vitality, in the power of seizing the moment, were no match for their wives, have, throughout my single life, been apt to regard me in the light of a benevolent uncle who would take care of their wives for them, naively trusting that I was not the kind to indemnify myself for the time I gave them.
     I returned to the drawing-room and told his wife that her husband had left. She wore a very curious smile.
     From that moment on, with fear in my heart, for I was utterly inexperienced, I knew that it depended solely on myself whether I was to become this married woman's lover or not. I should not have been young and vital if I had not wished such an issue to come about; but at the same time I was far too timid to take the first step. For weeks to come nothing whatever happened except that Mrs. Broegler and I became the best and most intimate friends. I knew that she was making advances to

me; I watched them, fascinated; but I was not only too timid, I was also too ignorant to meet her half-way.
     Before January was gone, my Saturday evening visits at the villa had become a regular and established feature in the lives of the three people concerned. When, on Sunday nights, or sometimes even on Monday mornings, I returned to the city, to boarding-house and school, we said to each other, "Till next week!" or, "We'll talk about that next Saturday." This was said as often by Dr. Broegler himself as by his wife. An invitation had become supererogatory. By this time we called each other, all three, by our first names, using the familiar 'Tu'
     At school, however, I continued to call the chemist formally Dr. Broegler, a fact which he appreciated, I believe, though he never said a word about it.
     My seventeenth birthday, in the middle of February, happened to fall on a Saturday; and Mrs. Broegler had arranged for a celebration, without, however, inviting other guests. Again I remember the atmosphere of the evening with great distinctness. Even Dr. Broegler delayed his departure for the tavern. It was one of the gayest nights I have had in my life; and about ten o'clock a bottle of champagne appeared. It was this wine, abhorred by him - he drank Spanish - which finally sent him away.
     At once Mrs. Broegler left the drawing-room to which she did not return for perhaps ten minutes. When she did, she had changed her clothes; she knew that she looked extraordinarily seductive. I was in a state of excitement which made my voice unsteady; yet I still did not know how to act. What was a woman anyway? Certainly she was a superior being.

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     She played for me; and I remember my attempts at singing to her accompaniment at which she laughed and laughed, for I was a monotone.
     Another hour went by; and then she disappeared a second time; I heard her tell the servants - there were two - to go to bed; and when she had locked the front door of the house, which she had never done before, she ran upstairs; to me it sounded as if I could hear her excitement in the quick fall of her feet. I was sitting in an arm-chair, pretending to look at the pictures in a magazine. The whole house sank into an utter silence.
     Then, perhaps shortly after eleven o'clock, I heard my name called from upstairs. I was in a state of extreme tension and jumped up. I felt that something was going to happen; but I did not know what. I stepped into the hall-door of the drawing-room and said, "Yes ?"
     "I am going to bed, dear," Mrs. Broegler said in a whisper. "You had better go, too."
     I was dumbfounded. "Already?" I asked as though disappointed.
     "Yes, come."
     In spite of that sense of disappointment, I said in a husky voice, "Very well."
     Now it had already struck me that the hall and the stairway were in utter darkness. It was before the days of electric light. I could not simply touch a switch.
     I turned back into the drawing-room; I felt I must pull myself together. There I tossed off the remainder of a glass of champagne; and I blew out the lights before I groped my way to the stairs. I was quite familiar with the lay-out of the house, of course; yet I held a match ready to light in case I should miss the door to my room. But I had hardly reached the top of the stairs when I

felt myself enveloped by her soft body, clothed in her night-gown. Simultaneously she placed her hand over my lips and drew me along to her bedroom.
     One fever was stilled; another was kindled. My fear of the other sex was by no means dead; but the memory of one week-end and the anticipation of the next kept me glowing. For weeks I neglected my work, tormented by questions. Just what was a woman? She, who had become my mistress, remained in more than one sense alien. I do not know whether it was the consequence of the use of her utmost skill or merely the result of the situation as it had developed. She was childless; and she was utterly without anything that could be called shame. Yet I still felt that she was letting herself down to my level; though she seemed to meet me on a footing of parity, she must be concealing her absolute superiority. Woman as such remained a mystery to me. Even the prostitute whom I had seen through the open door of the brothel seemed a superior being to me, something almost divine because it was different from myself. Unconsciously my mistress confirmed me in this. She treated me like a child; she played with me; the moment her sensuality was appeased she became maternal; and it was precisely that, the mystery in her, which held me as with bands of steel. I wanted forever to remain with her; she laughed and sent me back to school. I wanted to tell her husband and to take her away; again she laughed and called me an innocent. I could not understand that she could calmly contemplate the time when I should have to leave her; her as well as the city; to go on to the university and to a no doubt great career. "We shall meet again," she said; "one day when we shall talk of all this as belonging to the past." She was much less selfish than I.

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     Time flew; she urged me to work, work, work; and it was she who implanted in me a new ambition: that to come out first in the final examinations, in the "Abiturientenexamen"; and not only on the aggregate, but in every single subject, Greek included.
     Outwardly, my relation to Dr. Broegler remained unchanged; but inwardly it was now I who felt superior. In fact, I felt superior to everybody with whom I came in contact, even to my fellow-boarders at the boardinghouse.
     But they, of course, went on treating me as though I did not exist. By that time, with my new knowledge, I saw many things which I had so far overlooked. At last I could read the signs; and soon I was convinced that one of the boarders, an Englishman employed in a ship-broker's office competing with Uncle Jacobsen's house, was the landlady's lover; but, so I decided, in an entirely inferior, sordid way. Contemptuously I said to myself that, no doubt, he paid her. How vastly superior my liaison was to his in every way! I was still refraining from treating my mistress with anything like familiarity.
     But, as the end of the term approached, there was a subtle change in our relations. My mistress became insatiable. It began by her retaining me to a later and later hour in her room; till, one night, Dr. Broegler came home before I had left her. The door was locked, of course; he rattled it angrily; I don't know whether the fact aroused a suspicion. I slipped away; and she, throwing on night and dressing-gowns, ran down to open. I heard him stumbling up the stairs and, to my horror, concluded that he must be drunk. Next morning, she found a moment to whisper to me that she had explained the locked door by telling him there had been suspicious

noises about the house which had frightened her. At any rate, next Saturday Dr. Broegler did not go out but sat around all night, going up with us to bed in a very ill humour and before eleven o'clock.
     I walked my room for an hour or longer before I could compose myself; and next morning Dr. Broegler announced his intention of returning with me to town; he had forgotten certain class-papers at the school, he said; they had to be marked before Monday morning. My mistress and I did not even have the opportunity to exchange a kiss or a caress.
     This led to the next and, as far as I was concerned, final phase of the liaison.
     For on Monday, when I went home to the boardinghouse after school, I found her installed in an arm-chair, in the hail of the place, beautifully dressed and looking at me with a bewitching smile. We had to meet before witnesses there; and she managed things skilfully. I forget what pretext she alleged; but it was sufficient to justify her even in accompanying me to my little suite of two rooms, one of which was my study. We spent a triumphant hour together before I had a cab called to take her to the station. A purchase which she had made prior to her coming to my rooms was to explain her trip to her husband who would travel by the same train.
     Next week, on Saturday, all went the accustomed way; but nevertheless she came to town again on Wednesday, this time waiting for me near the school whence we walked home.
     Among my fellow-boarders the adventure was at once discovered; and henceforth there was never a meal at which some sly allusion was not made to my being "a deep one". By reason of my bonne fortune, I was hence-

forth treated much more like a grown-up; and, of course, I took the manners of one.
     It became a regular thing for us to meet twice a week, once at the villa at Blankenese, once at my rooms. My mistress had found a perfectly plausible explanation for her mid-week trips to town. The curator of the city's museum gave a lecture on Egyptology every Wednesday at three o'clock; and she acquired an absorbing interest in Egyptology. The lecture was delivered in the same building with the school; and at four or whatever the closing hour was, we met in a side street. In order not to run into her husband who might detain her, she left via a back-door. Then we had two hours to ourselves.
     The adventure matured me tremendously; and I quite agreed with the French moralist philosopher who advises mothers of young men to hand their sons over to some experienced woman of the world who would give them that polish and self-confidence which only such a liaison could impart.
     What surprises me today is that I actually managed, in spite of this tremendous distraction, to come out first in every subject, in the final examinations in spring, thus winning a scholarship payable in eight half-yearly instalments during the next four years, provided only I was properly enrolled in some recognized European university. Perhaps the amount of reading I did was still more surprising; for when I left Hamburg, I had a very fair survey in my mind of the literatures written in some five or six languages. Come to think of it, this love affair may even have been of assistance in furthering my academic aims; for it settled and canalized my whole emotional life. I was no longer inwardly burning. It is true, the vision of my mistress was never absent from my mind; but phys-

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ically I was at rest. To this day, when I read of Helen or of any of the great female figures of literature, I see them in the guise of this little woman.
     And then, quite towards the end - which neither of us considered as final; but I probably less than she - she made an appalling revelation: she was pregnant. She made it almost casually; but I soon discovered that she was triumphant. She had always wished to have a child, she said; and, of late, she had wished to have it from me. She laughed at my consternation. Was she sure? Of course, she was. No, it could not possibly be from her husband. What did I think? Would she have continued relations with him after we had met? Not she. Would not her husband suspect who was the father of her child? Suspect? He would know. He was sterile. Years ago, when it had first seemed as though there would be no child from their marriage, they had consulted a specialist; and this physician had left no doubt about it with whom lay the fault.
     But then, what would he say or do? She did not care. What if he left and divorced her? Let him! And she told me that, in a financial sense, she was not dependent on him. I, of course, knew nothing of such legal matters except inasmuch as my mother's relation to my father had given me some idea that a woman might have property apart from her husband. Strangely, this information seemed to rob our relation of some of its romanticism. I should have revelled in drama, challenging my father to give his consent to a marriage with the woman I loved. I was told that, as a rule, indeed, the husband disposed of his wife's fortune as if it were his own; but the father of my mistress, being a lawyer, had secured her property for her. My mistress laughed and laughed at the dis-

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comfiture I showed. It seemed as if she considered it an additional triumph that the father of her child should be a mere boy seventeen years old.
     The day came when we must meet for a last time. I was going home to spend the summer there till lectures opened at whatever university I was to attend. My mistress advised me to make it Berlin or Bonn, so she could manage to see me sometimes. I had to tell her that I was absolutely dependent on my father and should have to do what he wanted me to do. I swore eternal love to her, of course, and asked her to marry me if her husband divorced her. Again she laughed at me, though tears were in her eyes.
     The next day she was at the station; and as the train pulled out, and until it turned round a curve, she waved her hand to me.