arkly suspecting that they don't like me.

You see, Kloster hadn't been able to have me go to him till yesterday,
which was Saturday, and not then till the afternoon, so that I had had
all Friday and most of Saturday to be at a loose end in, except for
practising, and though I had got here prepared to find everybody very
charming and kind it was somehow gradually conveyed to me, though for
ages I thought it must be imagination, that Frau Berg and the other
boarders and the _Mittagsgaste_ dislike me. Well, I would have
accepted it with a depressed resignation as the natural result of being
unlikeable, and have tried by being pleasanter and pleasanter--wouldn't
it have been a dreadful sight to see me screwing myself up more and
more tightly to an awful pleasantness--to induce them to like me, but
the people in the streets don't seem to like me either. They're not
friendly. In fact they're rude. And the people in the streets can't
really personally dislike me, because they don't know me, so I can't
imagine why they're so horrid.

Of course one's ideal when one is in the streets is to be invisible,
not to be noticed at all. That's the best thing. And the next best is
to be behaved to kindly, with the patient politeness of the London
policemen, or indeed of anybody one asks one's way of in England or
Italy or France. The Berlin man as he passes mutters the word
_Englanderin_ as though it were a curse, or says into one's ear--they
seem fond of saying or rather hissing this, and seem to think it both
crushing and funny,--"_Ros bif_," and the women stare at one all over
and also say to each other _Englanderin_.

You never told me Germans were rude; or is it only in Berlin that they
are, I wonder. After my first expedition exploring through the
Thiergarten and down Unter den Linden to the museums last Friday
between my practisings, I preferred getting lost to asking anybody my
way. And as for the policemen, to whom I naturally turned when I
wanted help, having been used to turning to policemen ever since I can
remember for comfort and guidance, they simply never answered me at
all. They just stood and stared with a sort of mocking. And of course
they understood, for I got my question all ready beforehand. I longed
to hit them,--I who don't ever want to hit anybody, I whom you've so
often reprimanded for being too friendly. But the meekest lamb, a lamb
dripping with milk and honey, would turn into a lion if its pol