I suddenly knew, what I have always suspected, that I was blowsy,—­blowsy and loose-jointed, with legs that are too long and not the right sort of feet.  I hated my Beethovenkopf and all its hair.  I wanted to have less hair, and for it to be drawn neatly high off my face and brushed and waved in beautiful regular lines.  And I wanted a spotless lacy blouse, and a string of pearls round my throat, and a perfectly made blue serge skirt without mud on it,—­it was raining, and I had walked.  Do you know what I felt like?  A goodnatured thing.  The sort of creature people say generously about afterwards, “Oh, but she’s so goodnatured.”

Grafin Koseritz was terribly kind to me, and that made me shyer than ever, for I knew she was trying to put me at my ease, and you can imagine how shy that made me.  I blushed and dropped things, and the more I blushed and dropped things the kinder she was.  And all the time my contemporary, Helena, looked at me with the same calm eyes.  She has a completely emotionless face.  I saw no trace of a passion for music or for anything else in it.  She made no approaches of any sort to me, she just calmly looked at me.  Her mother talked with the extreme vivacity of the hostess who has a difficult party on hand.  There was a silent governess between two children.  Junkerlets still in the school-room, who stared uninterruptedly at me and seemed unsuccessfully endeavouring to place me; there was a young lady cousin who talked during the whole meal in an undertone to Helena; and there was Graf Koseritz, an abstracted man who came in late, muttered something vague on being introduced to me and told I was a new genius Kloster had unearthed, sat down to his meal from which he did not look up again, and was monosyllabic when his wife tried to draw him in and make the conversation appear general.  And all the time, while lending an ear to her cousin’s murmur of talk, Helena’s calm eyes lingered on one portion after the other of your poor vulnerable Chris.

Actually I found myself hoping hotly that I hadn’t forgotten to wash my ears that morning in the melee of getting up.  I have to wash myself in bits, one at a time, because at Frau Berg’s I’m only given a very small tin tub, the bath being used for keeping extra bedding in.  It is difficult and distracting, and sometimes one forgets little things like ears, little extra things like that; and when Helena’s calm eyes, which appeared to have no sort of flicker in them, or hesitation, or blink, settled on one of my ears and hung there motionless, I became so much unnerved that I upset the spoon out of the whipped-cream dish that was just being served to me, on to the floor.  It was a parquet floor, and the spoon made such a noise, and the cream made such a mess.  I was so wretched, because I had already upset a pepper thing earlier in the meal, and spilt some water.  The white-gloved butler advanced in a sort of stately goose-step with another