birthday cakes here, and it is the custom to give a slice of them to
every one who comes near you. So I looked round the room out of the
corners of my eyes, discreetly, lest I should seem to be as greedy as I
was, and I lifted my nose a little and waved it cautiously about, but I
neither saw nor smelt a cake. Frau Berg had a birthday three days ago,
and there was a heavenly cake at it, a great flat thing with cream in
it, that one loved so that first one wanted to eat it and then to sit
on it and see all the cream squash out at the sides; but evidently the
cake is the one thing you don't have for your birthday after you are
dead. I don't want to laugh, darling mother, and I know well enough
what it is to lose one's beloved Dad, but you see Hilda had shown me
her family photographs only the other day, for we are making friends in
a sort of flabby, hesitating way, and when she got to the one of her
father she said with perfect frankness that she hadn't liked him, and
that it had been an immense relief when he died. "He prevented my
doing anything," she said, frowning at the photograph, "except that
which increased his comforts."

I asked Kloster about anniversaries when I went for my lesson on
Friday. He is a very human little man, full of sympathy,---the sort of
comprehending sympathy that laughs and understands together, yet his
genius seems to detach him from other Germans, for he criticizes them
with a dispassionate thoroughness that is surprising. The remarks he
makes about the Kaiser, for instance, whom he irreverently alludes to
as S. M.--(short and rude for _Seine Majestat_)--simply make me shiver
in this country of _lese majeste_. In England, where we can say what
we like, I have never heard anybody say anything disrespectful about
the King. Here, where you go to prison if you laugh even at officials,
even at a policeman, at anything whatever in buttons, for that is the
punishable offence of Beamtenbeleidigung--haven't they got heavenly