deny it if they have done so, in fact they never tell lies.  Not long ago I heard you prating about honor, but I want to tell you, that doesn’t look to me like honor.”  She insisted upon truthfulness, treated boasting with fine ridicule, and was chary of compliments.  But when she did praise it was effective.  She did me many a good turn, and not until late in life, when I was past fifty, did I meet another woman, this time an elderly lady, who exerted such an educational influence upon me.  Even now I am still taking lessons and learn from people who are young enough to be my grandchildren.

Thus much about the good Schroeder girl, and after this digression in memory of her I ask once more:  “Well, how did we live?” I propose to show how we lived, by means of a series of pictures, and in order to introduce order and clarity into the description it will be well to divide our life as we lived it into two halves, a summer life and a winter life.

First, then, there was the summer life.  About the middle of June we regularly had the house full of visitors; for my mother, in accordance with the old custom, still kept in touch with her relatives, a trait which we children only very imperfectly inherited from her.  But let it be understood, she kept in touch with her relatives, not to derive advantages from them, but to bestow advantages.  She was incredibly generous, and there were times when we, after we had grown up, asked ourselves the question, which passion really threatened us most, the gaming passion of our father, or the giving and presenting passion of our mother.  But we finally discovered the answer to the question.  What our father did was simply money thrown away, whereas the excessive amounts given away by our mother were always unselfishly given and carried with them a quiet blessing.  No doubt a certain desire to be, so far as possible, a grande dame, if only in a very small degree, had something to do with it, but then all our doings show some elements of human weakness.  Later in life, when we talked with her about these things, she said:  “Certainly, I might have refrained from doing many things.  We spent far more than our income.  But I said to myself:  ’What there is will be spent anyhow, and so it is better for it to go my way than the other.’”

These summer months, from the middle of June on, were often made especially charming by the numbers of visitors in our home, mostly young women relatives from Berlin, who were both cheerful and talkative.  The household was then completely changed, for weeks at a time, and, the hatchet being temporarily buried, merriment and playing of sly tricks, with occasional boisterous pranks, became the order of the day.  The most brilliant performer in the fun-making competitions that frequently arose was always my father himself.  He was, as handsome men often are, the absolute opposite of Don Juan, and proud of his virtue.  But by as much as he was unlike Don Juan, he was charming