They do not know how to bake a pancake, and are mostly occupied with useless things, but they look desperately pretty. A peripatetic girls' school, dozens of which you see daily in Regent's Park, where they come for fresh air, appears to me like as many pathetic Peris, one more beautiful than the other, marching two and two, the grown-up ones together and conscious enough of their victorious gifts, the severe Ayah in the rear looking daggers at every male person. My idea of English ladies formed long ago at Paris was quite erroneous. . . . By the way, they are ridiculously learned."
"If you were here," Fanny wrote in reply, "you would find plenty of scope for your wit and fun in the taste for learning which the public exhibits this year. Of Alexander von Humboldt's lecture on physical geography at the university, you must have heard. But do you know that at His Majesty's desire he has begun a second course of lectures in the hall of the Singakademie attended by everybody who lays any claim to good breeding and fashion, from the king and the whole court, ministers, generals, officers, artists, authors, beaux esprits (and ugly ones, too), students, and ladies, down to your unworthy correspondent? The crowd is fearful, the public is imposing, and the lectures are very interesting indeed. Gentlemen may laugh as much as they like, but it is delightful that we, too, have the opportunity given us of listening to clever men. We fully enjoy this happiness, and must try to bear the scoffing. And now I will give up completely to your mockery, by confessing that we are hearing another course of lectures, from a foreigner, about experimental physics."
These confessions sound oddly in our day of lady doctors and female colleges. Poor Fanny was evidently in doubt as to how they would be received by the sarcastic Klingemann, but he was quite gracious in his reply.
