iting to me, seeing me, walking with me. With him
there it will be, every bit of it, perfect.

"When I come back to town in October," the Grafin said to me, "you must
stay with us. It is not fitting that Bernd's betrothed should live in
that boarding-house of Frau Berg's. Will not your mother soon join
you?"

It is very kind of her, I think. It appears that a girl who is engaged
has to be chaperoned even more than a girl who isn't. What funny
ancient stuff these conventions are. I wonder how long more we shall
have of them. Of course Frau Berg and her boarders are to the Junker
dreadful beyond words.

But her question about you set me thinking. Won't you come, little
mother? As it is such an unusual and never-to-be-repeated occurrence
in our family that its one and only child should be going to marry?
And yet I can't quite see you in August in lodgings in Berlin, come
down from your beautiful mountain, away from your beautiful lake.
After all, I've only got four more months of it, and then I'm finished
and can go back to you. What is going to happen then, exactly, I don't
know. Bernd says, Marry, and that you'll come and live with us in
Germany. That's all very well, but what about, if I marry so soon,
starting my public career, which was to have begun this next winter?
Kloster says impatiently. Oh marry, and get done with it, and that
then | I'll be sensible again and able to arrange my debut as a
violinist with the calm, I gather he thinks, of the disillusioned.

"I'm perfectly sensible," I said.

"You are not. You are in love. A woman should never be an artist.
Again I say, Mees Chrees, what I have said to you before, that it is
sheer malice on the part of Providence to have taken you, a woman, as
the vessel which is to carry this great gift about the world. A man,
gifted to the extent you so unluckily are, falls in love and is
inspired by it. Indeed, it is in that condition that he does his best
work; which is why the man artist is so seldom a faithful husband, for
the faithful husband is precluded from being in love."

"Why can't he be in love?" I asked, husbands now having become very
interesting to me.

"Because he is a faithful husband."

"But he can be in love with his wife."

"No," said Kloster, "he cannot. And he cannot for the same reason that
no man can go on wanting his dinner who has had it. Whereas," he went
on louder, because I had opened my mouth and was going to say
some