“May I beg for admission into this charmed circle?” he would say, shaking hands with the cousins, and comprehending the rest of the table in a sweeping bow. “My brewer over there⁠—not to mention the despairing gaze of the breweress!⁠—But, really, this Herr Magnus! Just now he has been delivering a discourse on folk-psychology. Shall I tell you what he said? ‘The Fatherland, it is true, is one enormous barracks. But all the same it’s got a lot of solid capacity, it’s genuine. I wouldn’t change it for the fine manners of the rest of them. What good are fine manners to me if I’m cheated right and left?’ And more of the same kind. I am at the end of my patience. And opposite me I have a poor creature, with churchyard roses blooming in her cheeks, an old maid from Siebenbürgen, who never stops talking about her brother-in-law, a man we none of us either know or wish to know. I could stand it no longer, I shook their dust from my feet, I bolted.”

“You raised your flag and took to your heels,” Frau Stöhr stated.