Then I thought I’d better wait and know more before sweeping Servia out of my disgusted sight.  There are probably lots of other things to know.  Kloster will tell me.  I find I have a profound distrust really of these people.  I don’t mean of particular people, like the Koseritzes and the Klosters and their friends, but of Germans in the mass.  It is a sort of deep-down discomfort of spirit, the discomfort of disagreement in fundamentals.

“Then there’ll be war?” I said to the Grafin, staring at her placid face, and not a bit pleased about being going to be an excellent little German.

“Oh, a punitive expedition only,” she said.

“Bernd thought it would mean Russia and France and you as well,” I said.

“Oh, Bernd—­he is in love,” said the Grafin, smiling.

“I don’t quite see—­” I began.

“Lovers always exaggerate,” she said.  “Russia and France will not interfere in so just a punishment.”

“But is it just?” I asked.

She gazed at me critically at this.  It was not, she evidently considered, a suitable remark for one whose business it was to turn into an excellent little German.  “Dear child,” she said, “you cannot suppose that our ally, the Kaiser’s ally, would make demands that are not just?”

“Do you think Friday’s papers are still anywhere about?” was my answer.  “I’d like to read the Austrian note, and think it over for myself.  I haven’t yet.”

The Grafin smiled at this, and rang the bell.  “I expect Dorner”—­Dorner is the butler—­“has them,” she said.  “But do not worry your little head this hot weather too much.”

“It won’t melt,” I said, resenting that my head should be regarded as so very small and also made of sugar,—­she said something like this the other day, and I resented that too.

“There are people whose business it is to think these high matters out for us,” she said, “and in their hands we can safely leave them.”

“As if they were God,” I remarked.

She looked at me critically again.  “Precisely,” she said.  “Loyal subjects, true Christians, are alike in their unquestioning trust and obedience to authority.”

I came upstairs then, in case I shouldn’t be able to keep from saying something truthful and rude.

What a misfortune it is that truth always is so rude.  So that a person who, like myself, for reasons that I can’t help thinking are on the whole base, is anxious to hang on to being what servants call a real lady, is accordingly constantly forced into a regrettable want of candour.  I wish Bernd weren’t a Junker.  It is a great blot on his perfection.  I’d much rather he were a navvy, a stark, swearing navvy, and we could go in for stark, swearing candour, and I needn’t be a lady any more.  It’s so middle-class being a lady.  These German aristocrats are hopelessly middle-class.