“I read a good deal and my favourite book at that time was Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes—I was not a stupid girl, you understand—and from it I had drawn a mishmash of notions which tended to support whatever I felt like doing, especially when I wanted to be destructive. Most adolescents are destructive, I suppose, but the worst are certainly those who justify what they do with a half-baked understanding of somebody’s philosophy. It was under the banner of Spengler, then, that I decided to surprise Magnus and rough him up a bit. He looked easy. A man who worried so much in private about the crease of his trousers was sure to be a poor fighter.

“The surprise was mine. I was bigger and stronger but I hadn’t had his experience in carnival fights and flophouses. He soon found out that hitting me on the head was no good, and hit me a most terrible blow in the diaphragm that knocked out all my breath. Then he bent one of my legs backward and sat on me. That was when we had our first conversation.

“It was long, and I soon discovered that he spoke my language. I don’t mean German; I had to teach him proper German later. I mean that he asked intelligent questions and expected sensible answers. He was also extremely rude. I told you I had a hoarse, thick voice, and he had trouble understanding me in French and English. ‘Can’t you speak better than that?’ he demanded, and when I said I couldn’t he simply said, ‘You’re not trying; you’re making the worst of it in order to seem horrible. You’re not horrible, you’re just stupid. So cut it out.’

“Nobody had ever talked to me like that. I was the Naegeli heiress, and I was extremely unfortunate; I was used to deference, and people putting up with whatever I chose to give them. Here was little Herr Trousers-Crease, who spoke elegant English and nice clean French and barnyard German, cheeking me about the way I spoke. And laying down the law and making conditions! ‘If you want to come here and watch me work you must behave yourself. You should be ashamed, smashing up all these pretty things! Have you no respect for the past? Look at this: a monkey orchestra of twenty pieces and a conductor, and you’ve reduced it to a boxful of scraps. I’ve got to mend it, and it won’t take less than four to six months of patient, extremely skilled work before the monkeys can play their six little tunes again. And all because of you! Your grandfather ought to tie you to the weathervane and leave you on the roof to die!’

“Well, it was a change from the bishop and my grandfather’s tears. Of course I knew it was bluff. He may have hoped to shame me, but I think he was cleverer than that. All he was doing was serving notice on me that he would not put up with any nonsense; he knew I was beyond shame. But it was a change. And I began, just a little, to like him. Little Herr Trousers-Crease had quality, and an egoism that was a match for my own.