for you; then your regulations of rank, and military obedience, and all the forms you preserve toward each other⁠—quite in the Spanish spirit, there is something reverent about it, I can do with it very well, at bottom. We civilians ought to show more of the same spirit in our customs and manners, I should really like it, and find it fitting. I think the world, and life generally, is such as to make it appropriate for us all to wear black, with a starched ruff instead of your stand-up collar; and for all our intercourse with each other to be subdued and ceremonial, and mindful of death. That would seem right and moral to me. There is another of Settembrini’s arrogant ideas; I may tell him so, some time: he thinks he has a monopoly of morals as well as of human dignity⁠—with his talk about ‘practical lifework’ and Sunday services in the name of ‘progress’⁠—as though one hadn’t something else to think about, on Sundays, besides progress!⁠—and his ‘systematic elimination of suffering’; you have not heard anything about that, but he has instructed me on the subject, and it is to be systematically eliminated by means of a lexicon. I may find all that positively immoral⁠—but what of it? I don’t tell him so, naturally.