the mild intellectual light re-emerge. "Do you imply that
we Germans are stupid, Uncle Ernst?" exclaimed a haughty and
magnificent nephew. Uncle Ernst replied, "To my mind. You
use the intellect, but you no longer care about it. That I
call stupidity." As the haughty nephew did not follow, he
continued, "You only care about the' things that you can
use, and therefore arrange them in the following order:
Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful;
imagination, of no use at all. No"--for the other had
protested--"your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than
is our Imperialism over here. It is the vice of a vulgar
mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand
square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one
square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the
same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it.
When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are
dead at once, and naturally. Your poets too are dying, your
philosophers, your musicians, to whom Europe has listened
for two hundred years. Gone. Gone with the little courts
that nurtured them--gone with Esterhaz and Weimar. What?
What's that? Your Universities? Oh, yes, you have learned
men, who collect more facts than do the learned men of
England. They collect facts, and facts, and empires of
facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?"

To all this Margaret listened, sitting on the haughty
nephew's knee.

It was a unique education for the little girls. The
haughty nephew would be at Wickham Place one day, bringing