I’m fearfully nervous and afraid, for so much depends on it, and in spite of knowing that somehow from somewhere I’ve got a kind of gift for fiddling.  Heaven knows where that little bit of luck came from, seeing that up to now, though you’re such a perfect listener, you haven’t developed any particular talent for playing anything, have you mother darling; and poor Dad positively preferred to be in a room where music wasn’t.  Do you remember how he used to say he couldn’t think which end of a violin the noises came out of, and whichever it was he wished they wouldn’t?  But what a mercy, what a real mercy and solution of our difficulties, that I’ve got this one thing that perhaps I shall be able to do really well, I do thank God on my knees for this.

There are four other boarders here,—­three Germans and one Swede, and the Swede and two of the Germans are women; and five outside people come in for the midday dinner every day, all Germans, and four of them are men.  They have what they call Abonnementskarten for their dinners, so much a month.  Frau Berg keeps an Open Midday Table—­it is written up on a board on the street railing—­and charges 1 mark 25 pfennigs a dinner if a month’s worth of them is taken, and 1 mark 50 pfennigs if they’re taken singly.  So everybody takes the month’s worth, and it is going to be rather fun, I think.  Today I was solemnly presented to the diners, first collectively by Frau Berg as Unser junge englische Gast, Mees—­no, I can’t write what she made of Cholmondeley, but some day I’ll pronounce it for you; and really it is hard on her that her one English guest, who might so easily have been Evans, or Dobbs, or something easy, should have a name that looks a yard long and sounds an inch short—­and then each of them to me singly by name.  They all made the most beautiful stiff bows.  Some of them are students, I gathered; some, I imagine, are staying here because they have no homes,—­wash-ups on the shores of life; some are clerks who come in for dinner from their offices near by; and one, the oldest of the men and the most deferred to, is a lawyer called Doctor something.  I suppose my being a stranger made them silent, for they were all very silent and stiff, but they’ll get used to me quite soon I expect, for didn’t you once rebuke me because everybody gets used to me much too soon?  Being the newest arrival I sat right at the end of the table in the darkness near the door, and looking along it towards the light it was really impressive, the concentration, the earnestness, the thoroughness, the skill, with which the two rows of guests dealt with things like gravy on their plates,—­elusive, mobile things that are not caught without a struggle.  Why, if I can manage to apply myself to fiddling with half that skill and patience I shall be back home again in six months!