r the future were quite groundless, as most fears are,
is a fact relevant but not consequent.

Johanna was vivacious and eminently social. She spoke French, German,
English and Italian. She played the harp, sang, wrote poetry and acted
in dramas of her own composition. Around her there always clustered a
goodly group of men with long hair, dreamy eyes and pointed beards, who
soared high, dived deep, but seldom paid cash. This is the paradise to
which most women wish to attain: to be followed by a concourse of
artistic archangels--what nobler ambition! And let the great biological
and historical fact here be written down--that there are no female
angels.

Heinrich did not settle down in Hamburg and go into business, as he
expected. He and his wife and boy traveled much--through England,
France, Germany and Switzerland.

This man and his wife were trying to get away from themselves. Long
years after, their son wrote, "When people die and wake up in hell they
will probably be surprised to find that they are just such beings as
they were when they were on earth."

For a year the lad was left at school with a clergyman at Wimbledon, in
England. The strict religious discipline to which he was there subjected
seemed to have had much to do with forming in him a fierce hatred of
English orthodoxy; but he learned the language and became familiar with
the great names in English literature. The King Arthur stories pleased
him, and he always took a peculiar satisfaction in the fact that the
name Arthur was the same in English, German and French. He was a
prenatal cosmopolitan.

Boarding-schools are a great scheme for getting the children out of the
way--it throws the responsibility upon some one else. When nine years of
age, Arthur was placed in a French boarding-school, remaining for two
years. There he learned to speak French so fluently that when he
returned to Hamburg and tried to talk to his mother in German, his
broken speech threw that excellent woman into fits of laughter.

When the mature man of affairs takes a young girl to wife, he expects to
mold her to his nature, but he reckons without his host. Heinrich
Schopenhauer's opposition to his wife's wishes was not strong enough to
crush her--it simply developed in her a deal of wilful, dogged strength.

One winter day in Eighteen Hundred Four the body of Heinrich
Schopenhauer was found in the canal at Hamburg.

Arthur was then sixteen years of age--old for his years