going sailing on the Haff in a fishing boat there is.  We’re taking tea, and are going to be away till the evening.  The fishing boat has orange-coloured sails, and is quite big,—­I mean you can walk about on her and she doesn’t tip up.  We’re going to run her nose into the rushes along the shore when we’re tired of sailing, and Bernd is going to hear me say my German psalms and read Heine to me.  Good-bye then for the moment, my little darling one.  How very heavenly it is being engaged, and having the right to go off openly for hours with the one person you want to be with, and nobody can say, “No, you mustn’t.”  Do you know Bernd has to have the Kaiser’s permission to marry?  All officers have to, and he quite often says no.  The girl has to prove she has an income of her own of at least 5000 marks—­that’s 250 pounds a year—­and be of demonstrably decent birth.  Well, the birth part is all right—­I wonder if the Kaiser knows how to pronounce Cholmondeley—­and of course once I get playing at concerts I shall earn heaps more than the 250 pounds; so I expect we shall be able to arrange that.  Kloster will give me a certificate of future earning powers, I’m sure.  But marrying seems so far off, such a dreamy thing, that I’ve not begun really to think of it.  Being engaged is quite lovely enough to go on with.  There’s Bernd calling.

  Evening.

I’ve just come in.  It’s ten o’clock.  I’ve had the most perfect day.  Little mother, what an amazingly beautiful world it is.  Everything is combining to make this summer the most wonderful of summers for me.  How I shall think of it when I am old, and laugh for joy.  The weather is so perfect, people are so kind, my playing prospects are so encouraging; and there’s Bernd.  Did you ever know such a lot of lovely things for one girl?  All my days are filled with sunshine and love.  Everywhere I look there’s nothing but kindness.  Do you think the world is getting really kinder, or is it only that I’m so happy?  I can’t help thinking that all that talk I heard in Berlin, all that restlessness and desire to hit out at somebody, anybody,—­the knock-him-down-and-rob him idea they seemed obsessed with, was simply because it was drawing near the holiday time of year, and every one was overworked and nervy after a year’s being cooped up in offices; and then the great heat came and finished them.  They were cross, like overtired children, cross and quarrelsome.  How cross I was too, tormented by those flies!  After this month, when everybody has been away at the sea and in the forests, they’ll be different, and as full of kindliness and gentleness as these gentle kind skies are, and the morning and the evening, and the placid noons.  I don’t believe anybody who has watched cows pasturing in golden meadows, as Bernd and I have for hours this afternoon, or heard water lapping among reeds, or seen eagles shining far up in the blue above the pine trees, and drawn in with every breath the sweetness, the extraordinary