We drove out through Potsdam in the direction of Brandenburg, and lunched in the woods at Potsdam by the lake the Marmor Palais is on.  Kloster stared at this across the water while he ate, and the sight of it tinged his speech regrettably.  Herr von Inster, as an officer of the King, ought really to have smitten him with the flat side of his sword, but he didn’t; he listened and smiled.  Perhaps he felt as the really religious do about God, that the Hohenzollerns are so high up that criticism can’t harm them, but I doubt it; or perhaps he regards Kloster indulgently, as a gifted and wayward child, but I doubt that too.  He happens to be intelligent, and is not to be persuaded that a spade is anything but a spade, however much it may be got up to look like the Ark of the Covenant or anything else archaic and bedizened—­God forbid, little mother, that you should suppose I meant that dreadful pun.

Frau Kloster had brought food with her, part of which was cherries, and they slid down one’s hot dry throat like so many cool little blessings.  I could hardly believe that I had really escaped the Sunday dinner at the pension.  We were very content, all of us I think, sitting on the grass by the water’s edge, a tiny wind stirring our hair—­except Kloster’s, because he so happily hasn’t got any, which must be delicious in hot weather,—­and rippling along the rushes.

“She grows less pale every hour,” Kloster said to Herr von Inster, fixing his round eyes on me.

Herr von Inster looked at me with his grave shrewd ones, and said nothing.

“We brought out a windflower,” said Kloster, “and behold we will return with a rose.  At present, Mees Chrees, you are a cross between the two.  You have ceased to be a windflower, and are not yet a rose.  I wager that by five o’clock the rose period will have set in.”

They were both so kind to me all day, you can’t think little mother, and so was Frau Kloster, only one keeps on forgetting her.  Herr von Inster didn’t talk much, but he looked quite as content as the rest of us.  It is strange to remember that only this morning I was writing about feeling so lonely and by myself in spirit.  And so I was; and so I have been all this week.  But I don’t feel like that now.  You see how the company of one righteous man, far more than his prayers, availeth much.  And the company of two of them availeth exactly double.  Kloster is certainly a righteous man, which I take it means a man who is both intelligent and good, and so I am sure is Herr von Inster.  If he were not, he, a Junker and an officer, would think being with people so outside his world as the Klosters intolerable.  But of course then he wouldn’t be with them.  It wouldn’t interest him.  It is so funny to watch his set, regular, wooden profile, and then when he turns and looks at one to see his eyes.  The difference just eyes can make!  His face is the face of the drilled, of the perfect unthinking machine, the correct and well-born Oberleutnant; and out of it look the eyes of a human being who knows, or will know I’m certain before life has done with him, what exultations are, and agonies, and love, and man’s unconquerable mind.  He really is very nice.  I’m sure you’d like him.