caused a feeling of constraint.  I can still see the suite of spacious rooms she occupied, where silence reigned except when Coco, the parrot, raised his shrill voice.  Her companion, Fraulein Raffius, always lowered her voice in her presence, though when out of it she could play with us very merrily.  The elderly servant, who, singularly enough, was of noble family—­his real name was Von Wurmkessel —­did his duty as noiselessly as a shadow.  Then there was a faint perfume of mignonette in most of the rooms, which makes me think of them whenever I see the pretty flower, for, as is well known, smell is the most powerful of all the senses in awakening memory.

I never sat in my grandmother’s lap.  When we wished to talk with her we had to sit beside her; and if we kept still she would question us searchingly about everything—­our play, our friends, our school.

This silence, which always struck us children at first with astonishment, was interrupted very gaily by our aunt, whose liveliness broke in upon it like the sound of a horn amid the stillness of a forest.  Her cheerful voice was audible even in the hall, and when she crossed the threshold we flew to her, and the spell was broken.  For she, the only daughter, put no restraint on herself in the reserved presence of her mother.  She kissed her boisterously, asked how she was, as if she were the mother, the other the child.  Indeed, she took the liberty sometimes of calling the old lady “Henrietta”—­that was her name—­or even “Hetty.”  Then, when grandmother pointed to us and exclaimed reproachfully, “Why, Sophie!” our aunt could always disarm her with gay jests.

Though the two were generally at a distance, their existence made itself felt again and again either through letters or presents or by their coming to Berlin, which always brought holidays for us.

These journeys were accomplished under difficulties.  Our aunt had always used an open carriage, and was really convinced that she would stifle in a closed railway compartment.  But as she would not forego the benefit of rapid transit, our grandmother was obliged, even after her daughter’s marriage, to hire an open truck for her, on which, with her faithful maid Minna, and one of her dogs, or sometimes with her husband or a friend as a companion, she established herself comfortably in an armchair of her own, with various other conveniences about her.  The railway officials knew her, and no doubt shrugged their shoulders, but the warmheartedness shining in her eyes and her unvarying cheerfulness carried everything before them, so that her eccentricity was readily overlooked.  And she had plenty of similar caprices.  I was visiting her once in the Christmas holidays, when I was a schoolboy in the upper class, and we had retired for the night.  At one o’clock my aunt suddenly appeared at my bedside, waked me, and told me to get up.  The first snow had fallen, and she had had the horses harnessed for us to go sleighing, which she particularly enjoyed.