I feel greatly refreshed, for what do you think I’ve been doing since I left off writing this morning?  Motoring out into the country,—­the sweet and blessed country, the home of God’s elect, as the hymn says, only the hymn meant Jerusalem, and the golden kind of Jerusalem, which can’t be half as beautiful as just plain grass and daisies.  Herr von Inster appeared up here about twelve.  Wanda came to my door and banged on it with what sounded like a saucepan, and I daresay was, for she wouldn’t waste time leaving off stirring the pudding while she went to open the front door, and she called out very loud, “Der Herr Offizier ist schon wieder da.”

All the flat must have heard her, and so did Herr von Inster.

“Here I am, schon meeder da” he said, clicking his heels together when I came into the diningroom where he was waiting among the debris of the first spasms of Wanda’s table-laying; and we both laughed.

He said the Master—­so he always speaks of Kloster, and with such affection and admiration in his voice—­and his wife were downstairs in his car, and wanted him to ask me to join them so that he might drive us all into the country on such a fine day.

You can imagine how quickly I put on my hat.

“It is doing you good already,” he said, looking at me as we went down the four nights of stairs,—­so Kloster had been telling him, too, that story about too much work.

Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn’t get as much talk with him as I had hoped, for I like him very much, and so would you, little mother.  There is nothing of the aggressive swashbuckler about him.  I’m sure he doesn’t push a woman off the pavement when there isn’t room for him.

I don’t think I’ve told you about Frau Kloster, but that is because one keeps on forgetting she is there.  Perhaps that quality of beneficent invisibleness is what an artist most needs in a wife.  She never says anything, except things that require no answering.  It’s a great virtue, I should think, in a wife.  From time to time, when Kloster has lese majestated a little too much, she murmurs Aber Adolf; or she announces placidly that she has just killed a mosquito; or that the sky is blue; and Kloster’s talk goes on on the top of this little undercurrent without taking the least notice of it.  They seem very happy.  She tends him as carefully as one would tend a baby,—­one of those quite new pink ones that can’t stand anything hardly without crumpling up,—­and competently clears life round him all empty and free, so that he has room to work.  I wish I had a wife.