"Allen, Grant - Miss Cayley's Adventures 03 - The Adenture of the Inquisitive American" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Grant)

art should be most useful to an adventuress; for she must
need all the arts that human skill has developed.

So to Frankfort I betook myself, and found there a nice
little pension--'for ladies only,' Frau Bockenheimer assured
me--at very moderate rates, in a pleasant part of the
Lindenstrasse. It had dimity curtains. I will not deny
that as I entered the house I was conscious of feeling
lonely; my heart sank once or twice as I glanced round the
luncheon-table at the domestically-unsympathetic German old
maids who formed the rank-and-file of my fellow-boarders.
There they sat--eight comfortable Fraus who had missed their
vocation; plentiful ladies, bulging and surging in tightly
stretched black silk bodices. They had been cut out for
such housewives as Harold Tillington had described, but
found themselves deprived of their natural sphere in life by
the unaccountable caprice of the men of their nation. Each
was a model Teutonic matron manque. Each looked capable of
frying Frankfort sausages to a turn, and knitting woollen
socks to a remote eternity. But I sought in vain for one
kindred soul among them. How horrified they would have
been, with their fat pudding-faces and big saucer-eyes, had
I boldly announced myself as an English adventuress!

I spent my first morning in laborious self-education at
the Ariadneum and the Stadel Gallery. I borrowed a
catalogue. I wrestled with Van der Weyden; I toiled like a
galley-slave at Meister Wilhelm and Meister Stephan. I have
a confused recollection that I saw a number of stiff
mediaeval pictures, and an alabaster statue of the lady who
smiled as she rode on a tiger, taken at the beginning of
that interesting episode. But the remainder of the
Institute has faded from my memory.

In the afternoon I consoled myself for my herculean
efforts in the direction of culture by going out for a
bicycle ride on a hired machine, to which end I decided to
devote my pocket-money. You will, perhaps, object here that
my conduct was imprudent. To raise that objection is to
misunderstand the spirit of these artless adventures. I
told you that I set out to go round the world; but to go
round the world does not necessarily mean to circumnavigate
it. My idea was to go round by easy stages, seeing the
world as I went as far as I got, and taking as little heed
as possible of the morrow. Most of my readers, no doubt,
accept that philosophy of life on Sundays only; on week-days
they swallow the usual contradictory economic platitudes
about prudential forethought and the horrid improvidence of
the lower classes. For myself, I am not built that way. I
prefer to take life in a spirit of pure inquiry. I put on