_Berlin, Sunday, June 2lst, 1914_.

My precious mother,

The weeks fly by, full of work and _Weltpolitik_. They talk of nothing
here at meals but this _Weltpolitik_. I've just been having a dose of
it at breakfast. To say that the boarders are interested in it is to
speak feebly: they blaze with interest, they explode with it, they
scorch and sizzle. And they are so pugnacious! Not to each other, for
contrary to the attitude at Kloster's they are knit together by the
toughest band of uncritical and obedient admiration for everything
German, but they are pugnacious to the Swede girl and myself.
Especially to myself. There is a holy calm about the Swede girl that
nothing can disturb. She has an enviable gift for getting on with her
meals and saying nothing. I wish I had it. Directly I have learned a
new German word I want to say it. I accumulate German words every day,
of course, and there's something in my nature and something in the way
I'm talked at and to at Frau Berg's table that makes me want to say all
the words I've got as quickly as possible. And as I can't string them
into sentences my conversation consists of single words, which produce
a very odd effect, quite unintended, of detached explosions. When I've
come to the end of them I take to English, and the boarders plunge in
after me, and swim or drown in it according to their several ability.

It's queer, the atmosphere here,--in this house, in the streets,
wherever one goes. They all seem to be in a condition of tension--of
intense, tightly-strung waiting, very like that breathless expectancy
in the last act of "Tristan" when Isolde's ship is sighted and all the