them, each in its little garden of standard roses, all
quiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine.

I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country has
its own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in me
something which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, many
of us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to our
governesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an American
friend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head a
little averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from my
childhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in the
story of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey....
"Do you remember Fraeulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover and
wore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolined
photograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny--that is the point of this
relationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance and
form of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majesty
of the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, to
have to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet,
just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice.

There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relation
between a developing child (not, of course, a mere growing young brute)
and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, a
little solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whose
affection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality,
and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matter
of course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with the
delicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever we
learn of life in this relationship is of one very different from our
own, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressed
home-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us,
and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbing
away of angles (and other portions of soul) by brothers and sisters, and
general contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it is
possible to have a little too much.

Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the
power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the
literature itsel