In parenthesis, I may mention that, in the early terrible days of the war, our thoughtful Press, wishing to make money out of public hysteria, had the bright idea of turning this simple, devoted woman into a spy.  There was not a pressman who did not laugh in his sleeve at this and openly make a stunt of it, but it had its political uses; and, after the Russians had been seen with snow on their boots by everyone in England, the gentlemen of the Press calculated that almost anything would be believed if it could be repeated often enough.  And they were right:  the spiteful and the silly disseminated lies about our governess from door to door with the kind of venom that belongs in equal proportions to the credulous, the cowards and the cranks.  The greenhorns believed it and the funkers, who saw a plentiful crop of spies in every bush, found no difficulty in mobilising their terrors from my governess —­already languishing in the Tower of London—­to myself, who suddenly became a tennis-champion and an habituee of the German officers’ camps!

The Dresden of my day was different from the Dresden of twenty years after.  I never saw an English person the whole time I was there.  After settling into my new rooms, I wrote out for myself a severe Stundenplan, which I pinned over my head next to my alarm-clock.  At 6 every morning I woke up and dashed into the kitchen to have coffee with the solitary slavey; after that I practised the fiddle or piano till 8.30, when we had the pension breakfast; and the rest of the day was taken up by literature, drawing and other lessons.  I went to concerts or the opera by myself every night.

One day Frau von Mach came to me greatly disdressed by a letter she had received from my mother begging her to take in no men lodgers while I was in the pension, as some of her friends in England had told her that I might elope with a foreigner.  To this hour I do not know whether my mother was serious; but I wrote and told her that Frau von Mach’s life depended on her lodgers, that there was only one permanent lodger—­an old American called Loring, who never spoke to me—­and that I had no time to elope.  Many and futile were the efforts to make me return home; but, though I wrote to England regularly, I never alluded to any of them, as they appeared childish to me.

I made great friends with Frau von Mach and in loose moments sat on her kitchen-table smoking cigarettes and eating black cherries; we discussed Shakespeare, Wagner, Brahms, Middlemarch, Bach and Hegel, and the time flew.

One night I arrived early at the Opera House and was looking about while the fiddles were tuning up.  I wore my pearls and a scarlet crepe-de-chine dress and a black cloth cape with a hood on it, which I put on over my head when I walked home in the rain.  I was having a frank stare at the audience, when I observed just opposite me an officer in a white uniform.  As the Saxon soldiers wore pale blue, I wondered what army he could belong to.