which he could only remember with
shame. He thought of the times when his mother had implored him with
anxious, fervent words to be good. How ill he had succeeded as to that
"goodness"! That dear tender mother had not grudged him the freedom of
youth; often she had told him that she had no wish to see him a
priggish, model boy, but had urged him not to lag behind the others,
nor to fall short of his goal. This was chiefly because of the stingy,
well-to-do relations, whose goodwill she had to secure in order that he
might not have an utterly joyless youth. She had borne every burden,
and was prematurely aged through her anxiety that he should attain the
object which had shone so brightly in the future: namely, the family
scholarship at the University of Jena, an endowment founded by a
Frielinghausen of old for the benefit of his descendants.

Then came the catastrophe. Never in all his life would he forget the
blank dismay of his mother when the head of the gymnasium interviewed
her and told her of the inevitable expulsion. "Levity, carelessness,
lack of industry, superficiality in almost every subject," thus ran the
reports of his teachers.

Hereupon followed a period of dreary inaction, and again a feverish
succession of petitions and persuasions, with the object of obtaining
means for three years' private coaching, but the relations declined to
open their purses. So they had fallen upon this last expedient for
providing him with a career as a sort of mongrel, half officer, half
non-com.

He envied the simple lads who were his comrades. They had, it is true,
entered into new and strange conditions, but after all they remained in
their natural environment. Many of them had never been so well off as
in barracks. There was no bridge between the heights of culture to
which he had aspired and the uncivilised depths in which his comrades
dwelt so contentedly. Possibly they numbered among them fine and
loveable natures: he was most attracted by the shabby clerk Klitzing,
and by Vogt, the rough peasant-boy; but all these men, with their
scanty words and awkward gestures, fought shy of him, fearing to be
despised by an educated gentleman.

The prospect of intercourse with the non-commissioned officers, who, on
promotion, would be his comrades, promised to be but little better than
with the recruits. Among them he met, for the most part, with the same
distrustful reticence that he had experienced among the men, though a
few