Well, darling one, you see I’m peevish.  It’s because I’m so hot, and it doesn’t get cool at night.  And the food is so hot too and so greasy, and the pallid young man with the red mouth who sits opposite me at dinner melts visibly and continuously all the time, and Wanda coming round with the dishes is like the coming of a blast of hot air.  Kloster says I’m working too much, and wants me to practise less.  I said I didn’t see that practising less would make Wanda and the young man cooler.  I did try it one day when my head ached, and you’ve no idea what a long day it seemed.  So empty.  Nothing to do.  Only Berlin.  And one feels more alone in Berlin than anywhere in the world, I think.  Kloster says it’s because I’m working too much, but I don’t see how working less would make Berlin more companionable.  Of course I’m not a bit alone really, for there is Kloster, who takes a very real and lively interest in me and is the most delightful of men, and there is Herr von Inster, who has been twice to see me since that day I lunched at his aunt’s, and everybody in this house talks to me now,—­more to me, I think, than to any other of the boarders, because I’m English and they seem to want to educate me out of it.  And Hilda Seeberg has actually got as far in friendship as a cautious invitation to have chocolate with her one afternoon some day in the future at Wertheim’s; and the pallid young man has suggested showing me the Hohenzollern museum some Sunday, where he can explain to me, by means of relics, the glorious history of that high family, as he put it; and Frau Berg, though she looks like some massive Satan, isn’t really satanic I expect; and Dr. Krummlaut says every day as he comes into the diningroom rubbing his hands and passes my chair, “Na, was macht England?” which is a sign he is being gracious.  It is only a feeling, this of being completely alone.  But I’ve got it, and the longer I’m here and the better I know people the greater it becomes.  It’s an uneasiness.  I feel as if my spirit were alone,—­the real, ultimate and only bit of me that is me and that matters.

If I go on like this you too, my little mother, will begin echoing Kloster and tell me that I’m working too much.  Dear England.  Dear, dear England.  To find out how much one loves England all one has to do is to come to Germany.

Of course they talk of nothing else at every meal here now but the Archduke’s murder.  It’s the impudence of the Servians that chiefly makes them gasp.  That they should dare!  Dr. Krummlaut says they never would have dared if they hadn’t been instigated to this deed of atrocious blasphemy by Russia,—­Russia bursting with envy of the Germanic powers and encouraging every affront to them.  The whole table, except the Swede who eats steadily on, sees red at the word affront.  Frau Berg reiterates that the world needs blood-letting before there can be any real calm again, but it isn’t