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that the right sort of person kept a volume of Goethe on his bedside table and made for the High Mountains every chance he got. His women folk gathered up every word he dropped and always had his slippers waiting beside his armchair when he got home at night.

As the weather became a little pleasanter I went with Agnes and Walter Teutsch and their two children on Sunday outings in the country. Agnes was the younger sister of Fraulein Groth and her husband Walther, was a painter, and the friends who joined us at the long rustic table under the giant linden were largely artists and students who told funny stories and had personal charm. The Sunday outings tended to offset the ponderous traditions of Herr ?Prip? Groth as well as the forebodings aroused by the new race of the war profiteers. Not many years later, however, those same leafy spots were to give way to the concentration camps with all the ghastly paraphernalia for mass genocide of nazi Germany.