words--Kloster and people I have come across in his rooms say what they
like; and what they like is very rude indeed about that sacred man the
Kaiser, who doesn't appear to be at all popular. But then Kloster
belongs to the intelligents, and his friends are all people of
intelligence, and that sort of person doesn't care very much, I think,
for absolute monarchs. Kloster says they're anachronisms, that the
world is too old for them, too grown-up for pretences and decorations.
And when I went for my lesson on Friday I found his front door wreathed
with evergreens and paper flowers,--pretences and decorations crawling
even round Kloster--and I went in very reluctantly, not knowing what
sort of a memorial celebration I was going to tumble into. But it was
only that his wife--I didn't know he had a wife, he seemed altogether
so happily unmarried--was coming home. She had been away for three
weeks; not nearly long enough, you and I and others of our
self-depreciatory and self-critical country would think, to deserve an
evergreen garland round our door on coming back. He laughed when I
told him I had been afraid to come in lest I should disturb
retrospective obsequies.

"We are still so near, my dear Mees Chrees," he said, shrugging a fat
shoulder--he asked me what I was called at home, and I said you called
me Chris, and he said he would, with my permission, also call me
Chrees, but with Mees in front of it to show that though he desired to
be friendly he also wished to remain respectful--"we are still so near
as a nation to the child and to the savage. To the clever child, and
the powerful savage. We like simple and gross emotions and plenty of
them; obvious tastes in our food and our pleasures, and a great deal of
it; fat in our food, and fat in our women. And, like the child, when
we mourn we mourn to excess, and enjoy ourselves in that excess; and,
like the savage, we are afraid, and therefore hedge ourselves about