any rate till I’ve got them, by gentle and devious methods, a little more used to me.  So I gave in sullenly.  Don’t be afraid,—­only sullenly inside, not outside.  Outside I was so well-bred and pleased, you can’t think.  It really is very kind of the Grafin, and her want of enthusiasm, which was marked, only makes it all the kinder.  On that principle, too, my gratefulness, owing to an equal want of enthusiasm, is all the more grateful.

I don’t want to wait here till Monday.  I’d like to have gone today,—­got through all the miles of slow forest that lie between us and the nearest railway station, the miles of forest news has to crawl through by slow steps, dragged towards us in a cart at a walking pace once a day.  Nearly all today and quite all tomorrow we shall sit here in this sunny emptiness.  It is a wonderful day again, but to me it’s like a body with the soul gone, like the meaningless smile of a handsome idiot.  Evidently, little mother, your unfortunate Chris is very seriously in love.  I don’t believe it is news I want to be nearer to:  it’s Bernd.

As for news, the papers today seem to think things will arrange themselves.  They’re rather unctuous about it, but then they’re always unctuous,—­as though, if they had eyes, they would be turned up to heaven with lots of the pious whites showing.  They point out the awful results there would be to the whole world if Servia, that miserable small criminal, should dare not satisfy the just demands of Germany’s outraged and noble ally Austria.  But of course Servia will.  They take that for granted.  Impossible that she shouldn’t.  The Kaiser is cruising in his yacht somewhere up round Norway, and His Majesty has shown no signs, they say, of interrupting his holiday.  As long as he stays away, they remark, nothing serious can happen.  What an indictment of S. M.!  As long as he stays away, playing about, there will be peace.  How excellent it would be, then, if he stayed away and played indefinitely.

I wanted to say this to the Grafin when she read the papers aloud to us at lunch, and I wonder what would have happened to me if I had.  Well, though I’ve got to stay with her and be polite in the Sommerstrasse, I shall escape every other day to that happy, rude place, Kloster’s flat, and can say what I like.  I think I told you he is going to give me three lessons a week now.

  After tea,

I practised most of the morning.  I wrote to Bernd, and told him about Monday, and told him—­oh, lots of little things I just happened to think of.  I went out after lunch and lay in the meadow by the water’s edge with a book I didn’t read, the same meadow Bernd and I anchored our fishing boat at only the day before yesterday, but really ten years ago, and I lay so quiet that the cows forgot me, and came and scrunched away at the grass quite close to my head.  We had tea as usual on the terrace in the shady angle of the south-west walls, and the