The General held out his hand and Lisa bowed, prettily formal, with a quaint, prim smile which I can see still.
I went to the house often—as often, indeed, as I could. I met the Von Mendebachs at the usual haunts—the theatre, an occasional concert, the band on Sunday afternoon, and at the houses of some of the professors. It was Lisa who told me that another young Briton was coming to live in Gottingen—not, however, as a student at the University. He turned out to be a Scotsman—one Andrew Smallie, the dissolute offspring of a prim Edinburgh family. He had been shipped off to Gottingen, in the hope that he might there drink himself quietly to death. The Scotch do not keep their skeletons at home in a cupboard. They ship them abroad and give them facilities.
Andrew Smallie soon heard that there was an English student in Gottingen, and, before long, procured an introduction. I disliked him at once. I took good care not to introduce him to any friends of mine.
“Seem to lead a quiet life here,” he said to me one day when I had exhausted all conversation and every effort to get him out of my rooms.
“Very,” I replied.
“Don't you know anybody? It's a deuced slow place. I don't know a soul to talk to except yourself. Can't take to these beer-drinking, sausage-eating Germans, you know. Met that friend of yours, Carl von Mendebach, yesterday, but he didn't seem to see me.”
“Yes,” I answered. “It is possible he did not know you. You have never been introduced.”
“No,” he answered dubiously. “Shouldn't think that would matter in an out-of-the-way place like this.”
“It may seem out of the way to you,” I said, without looking up from my book. “But it does not do so to the people who live here.”
“D—d slow lot, I call them,” he muttered. He lighted a cigar and stood looking at me for some time and then he went away.