"German moonlight?"
"Yes! Yes! The moon drives me mad with its smirking even though I am Prussian Circuit Judge by Royal Appointment Friedrich Wilhelm Löhnefinke in Gross-Fauhlenberg, and not just for my own sins do I atone, but I have the accumulated debts of untold generations of my forebears to pay back as well to the shining monstrosity. Colleague, I feel at times most unhappy!"
"Colleague, you interest me most mightily as a person for all that.
I'm eagerly waiting for you to shed further light on this."
"Which I will. My father was an official by royal appointment and so was my grandfather, and it would be ridiculous for me to doubt that my great-grandfather too fell into the same category, a provincial official, it goes without saying. My mother was a German matriarch as was my grandmother and my great-grandmother too, of course. They too were the issue of families of provincial officials. They knew nothing of poetry and only paid attention to the moon insofar as it was obliging enough to tell them when it was time to get their hair cut or to have themselves bled. They left it up to me to make amends for their collective neglect! My mother read Clauren, my grandmother the Bible and the hymn book and my great-grandmother was probably illiterate. My forebears read and wrote their statutes, read the Legal Times and maybe a newspaper and I was, until quite recently, their worthy descendant. Then came the year 1848 and the moon rose for me."
"Aha!" I re-uttered, but my legal colleague shook his head and said:
"No! No! No! That's not it at all! You're just as mistaken as you were before. Do you know what we understand by the words 'old liberal'?"
I nodded with all the energy of a nodding porcelain toy.
"You will therefore admit then that, as an old liberal, one is still quite far removed from hating the moon and running away from it?"
It would have been silly of me not to have made this admission and, in making it, I asked a counter question:
"How old were you in March of 1848?"