"And once believed them too," I lied.
"Oh, dear me," replied the Countess, with a ponderous sigh, "so I suppose you did. And what a shock I must have been to you with an eighty centimetre waist."
"You are not quite Junoesque," I admitted.
"The more reason you should use your science, Herr Chemist, to aid me to recover my goddess form."
"What are you folks talking about?" interrupted Marguerite.
"About our divinity, my dear," replied Luise archly.
"But do you feel that it is really necessary," I asked, "that such fables should be put into the helpless minds of children?"
"It surely must be. Suppose your own heredity had proven tricky--it does sometimes, you know--and you had been found incapable of scientific thought. You would have been deranked and perhaps made a record clerk--no personal reflections, but such things do happen--and if you now were filing cards all day you would surely be much happier if you could believe in our divinity. Why else would you submit to a loveless life and the dull routine of toil? Did not all the ancients, and do not all the inferior races now, have objects of religious worship?"
"But the other races," I said, "do not worship living people but spiritual divinities and the sainted dead.
"Quite so," replied the over-plump goddess, "but that is why their kulturs are so inefficient. Surely the worship was useless to the spirits and the dead, whereas we find it quite profitable to be worshipped. But for this wonderful doctrine of the divinity of the blood of William the Great we should be put to all sorts of inconveniences."