It was so queer, and so different.  There was the same Wanda, resting her dishes on my left shoulder, which she always used to do, not only so as to attract my attention but as a convenience to herself, because they were hot and heavy.  There were the same boarders, except the red-mouthed bank-clerk and another young man.  Hilda Seeberg was there, and the Swede, and Doctor Krummlaut; and of course Frau Berg, massive in her tight black dress buttoned up the front without a collar to it, the big brooch she fastens it with at the neck half hidden by her impressive double chins, which flow down as majestically as a patriarch’s beard.  We had the same food, the same heat, and I’m sure the same flies.  But the nervous tension there used to be, the tendency to quarrel, the pugnacious political arguing with me, the gibes at England, were gone.  I don’t know whether it was because I’m engaged to a Prussian officer that they were so very polite—­I was tremendously congratulated,—­but they were certainly different about England.  It may of course have been their general happiness—­happiness makes one so kind all round!—­for here too was the content, the satisfaction of those who, after painful waiting, get what they want.  It was expressed very noisily, not with the restraint of the Koseritzes, but it was the same thing really.  The Berg atmosphere was more like the one in the streets.  Where the Grafin in her pleasure became only more calm, the boarders were abandoned,—­excited like savages dancing round the fire their victims are to roast at.  Frau Berg rumbled and shook with her relief, like some great earthquake, and didn’t mind a bit apparently about the tremendous rise there has been in prices this week.  What will she get, I wonder, by war, except struggle and difficulty and departing boarders?  Being a guest, I had to be polite and let them say what they liked without protest,—­really, the disabilities of guests!  I couldn’t argue, as I would have if I’d still been a boarder, which was a pity, for meanwhile I’ve learned a lot of German and could have said a great many things and been as natural as I liked here away from the Grafin’s gentle smile reminding me that I’m not behaving.  But I had to sit and listen smilingly, and of course show none of my horror at their attitude, for more muzzling even than being a guest is being the betrothed of a Prussian officer. They don’t know what sort of a Prussian officer he is, how different, how truly educated, how full of dislike for the base things they worship and want; and he, caught by birth in the Prussian chains, shall not be betrayed by me who love him.  Here he is, caught anyhow for the present, and he must do his duty; but someday we’re going away,—­he, and I, and you, little mother darling, when there’s no war anywhere in sight and therefore no duty to stay for, and we’ll go and live in America, and he’ll take off all those buttons and spurs and things, and we’ll give ourselves up to freedom, and harmlessness, and art, and beauty, and we’ll have friends who neither intrigue, which is what the class at the top here lives by, nor who waste their lives being afraid, which is what all the other classes here spend their lives being.