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A young man comes up to them out of the dressing-room, and makes his bow: he has an expanse of white shirt-front and a little black string tie. He is as pretty as a picture, dark, with rosy cheeks, clean-shaven of course, but with just a sketch of side-whisker. Not a ridiculous or flashy beauty, not like a gypsy fiddler, but just charming to look at, in a winning, well-bred way, with kind dark eyes. He even wears his dinner-jacket a little awkwardly.

“Please don’t scold me, Cornelia,” he says; “it’s the idiotic lectures.” And Ingrid presents him to her father as Herr Hergesell.

Well, and so this is Herr Hergesell. He knows his manners, does Herr Hergesell, and thanks the master of the house quite ingratiatingly for his invitation, as they shake hands.”I certainly seem to have missed the bus,” says he, jocosely.”Of course I have lectures to-day up to four o’clock; I would have; and after that I had to go home to change.” Then he talks about his pumps, with which he has just been struggling in the dressing-room.

“I brought them with me in a bag,” he goes on.”Mustn’t tramp all over the carpet in our brogues—it’s not done. Well, I was ass enough not to fetch along a shoe-horn, and I find I simply can’t get in! What a sell! They are the tightest I’ve ever had, the numbers don’t tell you a thing, and all the leather to-day is just cast iron. It’s not leather at all. My poor finger”—he confidingly displays a reddened digit and once more characterises the whole thing as a “sell,” and a putrid sell into the bargain. He really does talk just as Ingrid said he did, with a peculiar nasal drawl, not affectedly in the least, but merely because that is the way of all the Hergesells.

Dr. Cornelius says it is very careless of them not to keep a shoehorn in the cloak-room and displays proper sympathy with the mangled finger.” But now you reallymust not let me disturb you any longer,” he goes on.”Auf wiedersehen!“

And he crosses the hall into the dining-room. There are guests there too, drinking tea; the family table is pulled out. But the Professor goes at once to his own little upholstered corner with the electric light bulb above it-the nook where he usually drinks his tea. His wife is sitting there talking with Bert and two other young men, one of them Herzl, whom Cornelius knows and greets; the other a typical ” Wandervogel ” named Möller, a youth who obviously neither owns nor cares to own the correct evening dress of the middle classes (in fact, there is no such thing any more), nor to ape the manners of a gentleman (and, in fact, there is no such thing any more either). He has a wilderness of hair, horn spectacles, and a long neck, and wears golf stockings and a belted blouse. His regular occupation, the Professor learns, is banking, but he is by way of being an amateur folk-lorist and collects folk-songs from all localities and in all languages. He sings them, too, and at Ingrid’s command has brought his guitar; it is hanging in the dressing-room in an oilcloth case. Herzl, the actor, is small and slight, but he has a strong growth of black beard, as you can tell by, the thick coat of powder on his checks. His eyes are larger than life, with a deep and melancholy glow. He has put on rouge besides the powder — those dull carmine high-lights on the cheeks can be nothing but a cosmetic.” Queer,” thinks the Professor.” You would think a man would be one thing or the other — not melancholic and use face paint at the same time. It’s a psychological contradiction. How can a melancholy man rouge? But here we have a perfect illustration of the abnormality of the artist soul-form. It can make possible a contradiction like this — perhaps it even consists in the contradiction. All very interesting — and no reason whatever for not being polite to him. Politeness is a primitive convention—and legitimate…. Do take some lemon, Herr Hofschauspieler! “