for everything German, but they are pugnacious to the Swede girl and myself.  Especially to myself.  There is a holy calm about the Swede girl that nothing can disturb.  She has an enviable gift for getting on with her meals and saying nothing.  I wish I had it.  Directly I have learned a new German word I want to say it.  I accumulate German words every day, of course, and there’s something in my nature and something in the way I’m talked at and to at Frau Berg’s table that makes me want to say all the words I’ve got as quickly as possible.  And as I can’t string them into sentences my conversation consists of single words, which produce a very odd effect, quite unintended, of detached explosions.  When I’ve come to the end of them I take to English, and the boarders plunge in after me, and swim or drown in it according to their several ability.

It’s queer, the atmosphere here,—­in this house, in the streets, wherever one goes.  They all seem to be in a condition of tension—­of intense, tightly-strung waiting, very like that breathless expectancy in the last act of “Tristan” when Isolde’s ship is sighted and all the violins hang high up on to a shrill, intolerably eager note.  There’s a sort of fever.  And the big words!  I thought Germans were stolid, quiet people.  But how they talk!  And always in capital letters.  They talk in tremendous capitals about what they call the deutscke Standpunkt; and the deutsche Standpunkt is the most wonderful thing you ever came across.  Butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.  It is too great and good, almost, they give one to understand, for a world so far behind in high qualities to appreciate.  No other people has anything approaching it.  As far as I can make out, stripped of its decorations its main idea is that what Germans do is right and what other people do is wrong.  Even when it is exactly the same thing.  And also, that wrong becomes right directly it has anything to do with Germans.  Not with a German.  The individual German can and does commit every sort of wrong, just as other individuals do in other countries, and he gets punished for them with tremendous harshness; Kloster says with unfairness.  But directly he is in the plural and becomes Wir Deutschen, as they are forever saying, his crimes become virtues.  As a body he purifies, he has a purging quality.  Today they were saying at breakfast that if a crime is big enough, if it is on a grand scale, it leaves off being a crime, for then it is a success, and success is always virtue,—­that is, I gather, if it is a German success; if it is a French one it is an outrage.  You mustn’t rob a widow, for instance, they said, because that is stupid; the result is small and you may be found out and be cut by your friends.  But you may rob a great many widows and it will be a successful business deal.  No one will say anything, because you have been clever and successful.