Never should that wide sweep of brow and those deep set eyes, the whole noble thoughtfulness of such a head,”—­you mustn’t think me vain, little mother, he positively said all these things and was so angry—­“have been combined with the rubbish, in this case irrelevant and actually harmful, that goes to make up the usual pretty young face.  Mees Chrees, I could have wished you some minor deformity, such as many spots, for then you would not now be in this lamentable condition of being loved and responding to it.  And if,” he said as a parting shot, “Providence was determined to commit this folly, it need not have crowned it by choosing an Englishwoman.”

“What?” I said, astonished, following him out on to the steps, for he has always seemed to like and admire us.

“The English are not musical,” he said, climbing into the car that was to take him to the station, and in which Frau Kloster had been patiently waiting.  “They are not, they never were, and they never will be.  Purcell?  A fig for your Purcell.  You cannot make a great gallery of art out of one miniature, however perfect.  And as for your moderns, your Parrys and Stanfords and Elgars and the rest, why, what stuff are they?  Very nice, very good, very conscientious:  the translation into musical notation of respectable English gentlemen in black coats and silk hats.  They are the British Stock Exchange got into music.  No, no,” he said, tucking the dust-cover round himself and his wife, “the English are not musicians.  And you,” he called back as the car was moving, “You, Mees Chrees, are a freak,—­nothing whatever but a freak and an accident.”

We turned away to go indoors.  The Grafin said she considered he might have wished her good-bye.  “After all,” she remarked, “I was his hostess.”

She looked thoughtfully at me and Bernd as we stood arm-in-arm aside at the door to let her pass.  “These geniuses,” she said, laying her hand a moment on Bernd’s shoulder, “are interesting but difficult.”

I think, little mother, she meant me, and was feeling a little sorry for Bernd!

Isn’t it queer how people don’t understand.  Anyhow, when she had gone in we looked at each other and laughed, and Bernd took my hands and kissed them one after the other, and said something so sweet, so dear,—­but I can’t tell you what it was.  That’s the worst of this having a lover,—­all the most wonderful, beautiful things that are being said to me by him are things I can’t tell you, my mother, my beloved mother whom I’ve always told everything to all my life.  Just the things you’d love most to hear, the things that crown me with glory and pride, I can’t tell you.  It is because they’re sacred.  Sacred and holy to him and to me.  You must imagine them, my precious one; imagine the very loveliest things you’d like said to your Chris, and they won’t be half as lovely as what is being said to her.  I must go now, because Bernd and I are