I sit neatly in my chair while this sort of talk goes on—­and it goes on at every meal now that they have got over the preliminary stage of icy coldness towards me—­and I try to be sprightly, and bandy my six German words about whenever they seem appropriate.  Imagine your poor Chris trying to be sprightly with eleven Germans—­no, ten Germans, for the eleventh is a Swede and doesn’t say anything.  And the ten Germans, including Frau Berg, all fix their eyes reproachfully on me while as one man they tell me how awful my country is.  Do people in London boarding houses tell the German boarders how awful Germany is, I wonder?  I don’t believe they do.  And I wish they would leave me alone about the Boer war.  I’ve tried to explain my extreme youth at the time it was going on, but they still appear to hold me directly responsible for it.  The fingers that have been pointed at me down that table on account of the Boer war!  They raise them at me, and shake them, and tell me of the terrible things the English did, and when I ask them how they know, they say it was in the newspapers; and when I ask them what newspapers, they say theirs; and when I ask them how they know it was true, they say they know because it was in the newspapers.  So there we are, stuck.  I take to English when the worst comes to the worst, and they flounder in after me.

It is the funniest thing, their hostility to England, and the queer, reluctant, and yet passionate admiration that goes With it.  It is like some girl who can’t get a man she admires very much to notice her.  He stays indifferent, while she gets more exasperated the more indifferent he stays; exasperated with the bitterness of thwarted love.  One day at dinner, when they had all been thumping away at me, this flashed across me as the explanation, and I exclaimed in English, “Why, you’re in love with us!”

Twenty round eyes stared at me, sombrely at first, not understanding, and then with horror slowly growing in them.

“In love with you?  In love with England?” cried Frau Berg, the carving knife suspended in the air while she stared at me. “Nein, aber so was!” And she let down her heavy fists, knife and all, with a thud on the table.

I thought I had best stand up to them, having started off so recklessly, and tried to lash myself into bravery by remembering how full I was of the blood of all the Cholmondeleys, let alone those relations of yours alleged to have fought alongside the Black Prince; so though I wished there were several of me rather than only one, I said with courage and obstinacy, “Passionately.”

You can’t think how seriously they took it.  They all talked at once, very loud.  They were all extremely angry.  I wished I had kept quiet, for I couldn’t elaborate my idea in my limping German, and it was quite difficult to go on smiling and behaving as though they were all not being rude, for I don’t think they mean to be rude, and I was afraid, if I showed a trace of thinking they were that they might notice they were, and then they would have felt so uncomfortable, and the situation would have become, as they say, peinlich.