On Sunday mornings, darling mother, directly I wake I remember it is my day for being with you.  I can hardly be patient with breakfast, and the time it takes to get done with those thick cups of coffee that are so thick that, however deftly I drink, drops always trickle down what would be my beard if I had one.  And I choke over the rolls, and I spill things in my hurry to run away and talk to you.  I got another letter from you yesterday, and Hilda Seeberg, a girl boarding here and studying painting, said when she met me in the passage after I had been reading it in my room, “You have had a letter from your Frau Mutter, nicht?” So you see your letters shine in my face.

Don’t be afraid I won’t take enough exercise.  I go for an immense walk directly after dinner every day, a real quick hot one through the Thiergarten.  The weather is fine, and Berlin I suppose is at its best, but I don’t think it looks very nice after London.  There’s no mystery about it, no atmosphere; it just blares away at you.  It has everything in it that a city ought to have,—­public buildings, statues, fountains, parks, broad streets; and it is about as comforting and lovable as the latest thing in workhouses.  It looks disinfected; it has just that kind of rather awful cleanness.

At dinner they talk of its beauty and its perfections till I nearly go to sleep.  You know how oddly sleepy one gets when one isn’t interested.  They’ve left off being silent now, and have gone to the other extreme, and from not talking to me at all have jumped to talking to me all together.  They tell me over and over again that I’m in the most beautiful city in the world.  You never knew such eagerness and persistence as these German boarders have when it comes to praising what is theirs, and also when it comes to criticizing what isn’t theirs.  They’re so funny and personal.  They say, for instance, London is too hideous for words, and then they look at me defiantly, as though they had been insulting some personal defect of mine and meant to brazen it out.  They point out the horrors of the slums to me as though the slums were on my face.  They tell me pityingly what they look like, what terrible blots and deformities they are, and how I—­they say England, but no one could dream from their manner that it wasn’t me—­can never hope to be regarded as fit for self-respecting European society while these spots and sore places are not purged away.

The other day they assured me that England as a nation is really unfit for any decent other nation to know politically, but they added, with stiff bows in my direction, that sometimes the individual inhabitant of that low-minded and materialistic country is not without amiability, especially if he or she is by some miracle without the lofty, high-nosed manner that as a rule so regrettably characterizes the unfortunate people. “Sie sind so hochnasig,” the bank clerk who sits opposite me had shouted out, pointing an accusing finger at me; and for a moment I was so startled that I thought something disastrous had happened to my nose, and my anxious hand flew up to it.  Then they laughed; and it was after that that they made the speech conceding individual amiability here and there.