n
the floor, a row of empty beer bottles against the wall, piles of unbound,
ragged books in every corner--"for some provincial university where I
shall try and get a chair of philology. And I shall play tennis and go to
tea-parties." He interrupted himself and gave Philip, very neatly dressed,
with a clean collar on and his hair well-brushed, a quizzical look. "And,
my God! I shall have to wash."

Philip reddened, feeling his own spruceness an intolerable reproach; for
of late he had begun to pay some attention to his toilet, and he had come
out from England with a pretty selection of ties.

The summer came upon the country like a conqueror. Each day was beautiful.
The sky had an arrogant blue which goaded the nerves like a spur. The
green of the trees in the Anlage was violent and crude; and the houses,
when the sun caught them, had a dazzling white which stimulated till it
hurt. Sometimes on his way back from Wharton Philip would sit in the shade
on one of the benches in the Anlage, enjoying the coolness and watching
the patterns of light which the sun, shining through the leaves, made on
the ground. His soul danced with delight as gaily as the sunbeams. He
revelled in those moments of idleness stolen from his work. Sometimes he
sauntered through the streets of the old town. He looked with awe at the
students of the corps, their cheeks gashed and red, who swaggered about in
their coloured caps. In the afternoons he wandered about the hills with
the girls in the Frau Professor's house, and sometimes they went up the
river and had tea in a leafy beer-garden. In the evenings they walked
round and round the Stadtgarten, listening to the band.

Philip soon learned the various interests of the household. Fraulein
Thekla, the professor's elder daughter, was engaged to a man in England
who had spent twelve months in the house to learn German, and their
marriage was to take place at the end of the year. But the young man wrote
that his father, an india-rubber merchant who lived in Slough, did not
approve of the union, and Fraulein Thekla was often in tears. Sometimes
she and her mother might be seen, with stern eyes and determined mouths,
looking over the letters of the reluctant lover. Thekla painted in water
colour, and occasionally she and Philip, with another of the girls to keep
them company, would go out and paint little pictures. The pretty Fraulein
Hedwig had amorous troubles too. She was the daughter of a merchant i