Afterwards I would have liked best to go home and to sleep with the sound of it still in my heart, but Kloster sent round a note saying I was to come to supper and meet some people who would be useful for me to know.  One of his pupils, who brought the note, had been ordered to pilot me safely to the house, it being late, and as we walked and Kloster drove in somebody’s car he was there already when we arrived, busy opening beer bottles and looking much more appropriate than he had done an hour earlier.  I can’t tell you how kindly he greeted me, and with what charming little elucidatory comments he presented me to his wife and the other guests.  He actually seemed proud of me.  Think how I must have glowed.

“This is Mees Chrees,” he said, taking my hand and leading me into the middle of the room.  “I will not and cannot embark on her family name, for it is one of those English names that a prudent man avoids.  Nor does it matter.  For in ten years—­nay, in five—­all Europe will have learned it by heart.”

There were about a dozen people, and we had beer and sandwiches and were very happy.  Kloster sat eating sandwiches and staring benevolently at us all, more like an amiable and hospitable prawn than ever.  You don’t know, little mother, how wonderful it is that he should say these praising things of me, for I’m told by other pupils that he is dreadfully severe and disagreeable if he doesn’t think one is getting on.  It was immensely kind of him to ask me to supper, for there was somebody there, a Grafin Koseritz, whose husband is in the ministry, and who is herself very influential and violently interested in music.  She pulls most of the strings at Bayreuth, Kloster says, more of them even than Frau Cosima now that she is old, and gets one into anything she likes if she thinks one is worth while.  She was very amiable and gracious, and told me I must marry a German!  Because, she said, all good music is by rights, by natural rights, the property of Germany.

I wanted to say what about Debussy, and Ravel, and Stravinski, but I didn’t.

She said how much she enjoyed these informal evenings at Kloster’s, and that she had a daughter about my age who was devoted, too, to music, and a worshipper of Kloster’s.

I asked if she was there, for there was a girl away in a corner, but she looked shocked, and said “Oh no”; and after a pause she said again, “Oh no.  One doesn’t bring one’s daughter here.”

“But I’m a daughter.”  I said,—­I admit tactlessly; and she skimmed away over that to things that sounded wise but weren’t really, about violins and the technique of fiddling.

Not that I haven’t already felt it, the cleavage here in the classes; but this was my first experience of the real thing, the real Junker lady—­the Koseritzes are Prussians.  She, being married and mature, can dabble if she likes in other sets, can come down as a bright patroness from another world and clean her feathers in a refreshing mud bath, as Kloster put it, commenting on his supper party at my lesson last Friday; but she would carefully keep her young daughter out of it.