do not ask the erudite to dinner, one of the reasons,
as insufficient as the rest, being that they either wear day clothes in
the evening, or, if worldly enough to dress, mar the effect by white
satin ties with horse-shoe pins in them; and another is that they are
Liberals, and therefore uninvitable. When the unknown youth, passing
naturally from Kant and the older philosophers to the great Germans now
living, enthusiastically mentioned the leading lights in science and art
and asked if I knew them or had ever seen them--the mere seeing of them
he seemed to think would be a privilege--I could only murmur no. How
impossible to explain to this scion of an unprejudiced race the
limitless objection of the class called _Junker_--I am a female
_Junker_--to mix on equal terms with the class that wears white satin
ties in the evening. But it is obvious that a man who can speak with the
tongue of angels, who has put his seal on his century, and who will be
remembered when we have returned, forgotten, to the Prussian dust from
which we came--or rather not forgotten because we were at no time
remembered, but simply ignored--it is obvious that such a man may wear
what tie he pleases when he comes to dine, and still ought to be
received on metaphorical knees of reverence and gratitude. Probably,
however, if we who live in the country and think no end of ourselves did
invite such a one, and whether there were hostesses on knees waiting for
him or not, he would not come. How bored he would be if he did. He would
find us full of those excellences Pater calls the more obvious parochial
virtues, jealous to madness of the sensitive and bloodthirsty appendage
known as our honour, exact in the observance of minor conventionalities,
correct in our apparel, rigid in our views, and in our effect
uninterruptedly soporific. The man who had succeeded in pushing his
thoughts farther into the region of the hitherto unthought than any of
his contemporaries would not, I think, if he came once, come again. But
it is supposing the impossible, after all, to suppose him invited, for
all the great ones of whom the unknown youth talked are Liberals, and
all the _Junkers_ are Conservatives; and how shall a German Conservative
be the friend of a German Liberal? The thing is unthinkable. Like the
young man's own definition of the Absolute, it is a negation of the
conceivable.

By the time we had reached the chestnut grove in front of the inn I had
said so li