And all the while, while he was telling me these things, on the shore lay Kloster and his wife, neatly spread out side by side beneath a tree asleep with their handkerchiefs over their faces.  That’s the idea we’ve got in England of Germany,—­multitudes of comfortable couples, kindly and sleepy, snoozing away the afternoon hours in gardens or pine forests.  That’s the idea the Government wants to keep before Europe, Herr von Inster says, this idea of benevolent, beery harmlessness.  It doesn’t want other nations to know about the children, the dead, flung aside children, the ruthless breaking up of any material that will not help in the driving of their great machine of destruction, because then the other nations would know, he says, before Germany is ready for it to be known, that she will stick at nothing.

Wanda has just taken away my lamp, Good night my own sweet mother.

  Your Chris.

  Berlin, Wednesday, July 8th, 1914.

Beloved mother,

Kloster says I’m to go into the country this very week and not come back for a whole fortnight.  This is just a line to tell you this, and that he has written to a forester’s family he knows living in the depths of the forests up beyond Stettin.  They take in summer-boarders, and have had pupils of his before, and he is arranging with them for me to go there this very next Saturday.

Do you mind, darling mother?  I mean, my doing something so suddenly without asking you first?  But I’m like the tail being wagged by the dog, obliged to wag whether it wants to or not.  I’m very unhappy at being shovelled off like this, away from my lessons for two solid weeks, but it’s no use my protesting.  One can’t protest with Kloster.  He says he won’t teach me any more if I don’t go.  He was quite angry at last when I begged, and said it wouldn’t be worth his while to go on teaching any one so stale with over-practising when they weren’t fit to practise, and that if I didn’t stop, all I’d ever be able to do would be to play in the second row of violins—­(not even the first!)—­at a pantomime.  That shrivelled me up into silence.  Horror-stricken silence.  Then he got kind again, and said I had this precious gift—­God, he said, alone knew why I had got it, I a woman; what, he asked, staring prawnishly, is the good of a woman’s having such a stroke of luck?—­and that it was a great responsibility, and I wasn’t to suppose it was my gift only, to spoil and mess up as I chose, but that it belonged to the world.  When he said that, cold shivers trickled down my spine.  He looked so solemn, and he made me feel so solemn, as though I were being turned, like Wordsworth in The Prelude, into a dedicated spirit.