I know this view is not altogether unknown in other countries, but they don’t hold it deliberately as a whole nation.  Among other things that Hilda Seeberg’s father did which roused her unforgiveness was just this,—­to rob too few widows, come to grief over it, and go bankrupt for very little.  She told me about it in an outburst of dark confidence.  Just talking of it made her eyes black with anger.  It was so terrible, she said, to smash for a small amount,—­such an overwhelming shame for the Seeberg family, whose poverty thus became apparent and unhideable.  If one smashes, she said, one does it for millions, otherwise one doesn’t smash.  There is something so chic about millions, she said, that whether you make them or whether you lose them you are equally well thought-of and renowned.

“But it is better to—­well, disappoint few widows than many,” I suggested, picking my words.

“For less than a million marks,” she said, eyeing me sternly, “it is a disgrace to fail.”

They’re funny, aren’t they.  I’m greatly interested.  They remind me more and more of what Kloster says they are, clever children.  They have the unmoral quality of children.  I listen—­they treat me as if I were the audience, and they address themselves in a bunch to my corner—­and I put in one of my words now and then, generally with an unfortunate effect, for they talk even louder after that, and then presently the men get up and put their heels together and make a stiff inclusive bow and disappear, and Frau Berg folds up her napkin and brushes the crumbs out of her creases and says, “Ja, ja,” with a sigh, as a sort of final benediction on the departed conversation, and then rises slowly and locks up the sugar, and then treads heavily away down the passage and has a brief skirmish in the kitchen with Wanda, who daily tries to pretend there hadn’t been any pudding left over, and then treads heavily back again to her bedroom, and shuts herself in till four o’clock for her Mittagsruhe; and the other boarders drift away one by one, and I run out for a walk to get unstiffened after having practised all the morning, and as I walk I think over what they’ve been saying, and try to see things from their angle, and simply can’t.

On Tuesdays and Fridays I have my lesson, and tell Kloster about them.  He says they’re entirely typical of the great bulk of the nation. “Wir Deutschen,” he says, and laughs, “are the easiest people in the world to govern, because we are obedient and inflammable.  We have that obedience of mind so convenient to Authority, and we are inflammable because we are greedy.  Any prospect held out to us of getting something belonging to some one else sets us instantly alight.  Dangle some one else’s sausage before our eyes, and we will go anywhere after it.  Wonderful material for S. M.”  And he adds a few irreverences.