His principal anxiety was about my finding sleeping quarters.  When he had delivered himself three times over of all that I could lead him to say, I left him still puffing at his pipe.  He continued on guard to be in readiness to run for a doctor, should one be wanted.  Twice in the night I came across his path.  The night was quiet, dark blue, and starry; the morning soft and fragrant.  The burden of the night was bearable, but that of daylight I fled from, and all day I was like one expecting a crisis.  Laughter, with so much to arouse it, hardly had any foothold within me to stir my wits.  For if I said ‘Folly!’ I did not feel it, and what I felt I did not understand.  My heart and head were positively divided.  Days and weeks were spent in reconciling them a little; days passed with a pencil and scribbled slips of paper—­the lines written with regular commencements and irregular terminations; you know them.  Why had Ottilia fainted?  She recommended hard study—­thinks me idle, worthless; she has a grave intelligence, a serious estimation of life; she thinks me intrinsically of the value of a summer fly.  But why did she say, ‘We change countries,’ and immediately flush, break and falter, lose command of her English, grow pale and swoon; why?  With this question my disastrous big heart came thundering up to the closed doors of-comprehension.  It was unanswerable.  ‘We change countries.’  That is, she and Miss Sibley change countries, because the English woman marries a German, and the German princess—­oh! enormous folly.  Pierce it, slay it, trample it under.  Is that what the insane heart is big with?  Throughout my night-watch I had been free of it, as one who walks meditating in cloisters on a sentence that once issued from divine lips.  There was no relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest laughter a chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits raised for war, going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate shoulders, and feet of distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze a rhythmical drill-sergeant.  I exulted at the first reading, shuddered at the second, and at the third felt desperate, destroyed them and sat staring at vacancy as if I had now lost the power of speech.

At last I flung away idleness and came to a good resolution; and I carried it through.  I studied at a famous German university, not far from Hanover.  My father, after discussing my project with me from the point of view of amazement, settled himself in the University town, a place of hopeless dulness, where the stones of the streets and the houses seemed to have got their knotty problem to brood over, and never knew holiday.  A fire for acquisition possessed me, and soon an ungovernable scorn for English systems of teaching—­sound enough for the producing of gentlemen, and perhaps of merchants; but gentlemen rather bare of graces, and merchants not too scientific in finance.  Mr. Peterborough conducted the argument against me until my stout display of facts, or it may have been my insolence, combined with the ponderous pressure of the atmosphere upon one who was not imbibing a counteracting force, drove him on a tour among German cathedrals.