Good-bye till then, sweet mother.

  Your Chris.

  Koseritz, Saturday evening, July 18, 1914.

My darling little mother,

See where I’ve got to!  Who’d have thought it?  Life is really very exciting, isn’t it.  The Grafin drove over to Schuppenfelde this afternoon, and took me away with her here.  She said Kloster was coming for Sunday from Heringsdorf to them, and she knew he would want to see me and would go off to the Oberforsterei after me and leave her by herself if I were at the Bornsteds’, and anyhow she wanted to see something of me before I went back to Berlin, and I couldn’t refuse to give an old lady—­she isn’t a bit old—­pleasure, and heaps of gracious things like that.  Herr von Inster had brought a note from her in the morning, preparing my mind, and added his persuasions to hers.  Not that I wanted persuading,—­I thought it a heavenly idea, and didn’t even mind Helena, because I felt that in a big house there’d be more room for her to stare at me in.  And Herr von Inster is going to stay another week, taking his summer leave now instead of later, and he says he will see me safe to Berlin when I go next Saturday.

So we had the happiest morning wandering about the forest, he driving and letting the horses go as slowly as they liked while we talked, and after our sandwiches he took me back to the Bornsteds, and I showed Frau Bornsted the Grafin’s letter.

If it hadn’t been a Koseritz taking me away she would have been dreadfully offended at my wanting to go when only half my fortnight was over, but it was like a royal command to her, and she looked at me with greatly increased interest as the object of these high attentions.  She had been inclined to warn me against Herr von Inster as a person removed by birth from my sphere—­I suppose that’s because I play the violin—­and also against drives in forests generally if the parties were both unmarried; and she had been extraordinarily dignified when I laughed, and had told me it was all very well for me to laugh, being only an ignorant junges Madchen, but she doubted whether my mother would laugh; and she watched our departure for our picnic very stiffly and unsmilingly from the porch.  But after reading the Grafin’s letter I was treated more nearly as an equal, and she became all interest and co-operation.  She helped me pack, while Herr von Inster, who has a great gift for quiet patience, waited downstairs; and she told me how fortunate I was to be going to spend some days with Komtesse Helena, from whom I could learn, she said, what the real perfect junges Madchen was like; and by the time the Grafin herself drove up in her little carriage with the pretty white ponies, she was so much melted and stirred by a house-guest of hers being singled out for such an honour that she put her arm round my neck when I said good-bye, and whispered that though it wasn’t really fit for a junges Madchen to hear, she must tell me, as she probably wouldn’t see me again, that she hoped shortly after Christmas to enrich the world by yet one more German.