in her pleasure became only more calm, the
boarders were abandoned,--excited like savages dancing round the fire
their victims are to roast at. Frau Berg rumbled and shook with her
relief, like some great earthquake, and didn't mind a bit apparently
about the tremendous rise there has been in prices this week. What
will she get, I wonder, by war, except struggle and difficulty and
departing boarders? Being a guest, I had to be polite and let them say
what they liked without protest,--really, the disabilities of guests!
I couldn't argue, as I would have if I'd still been a boarder, which
was a pity, for meanwhile I've learned a lot of German and could have
said a great many things and been as natural as I liked here away from
the Grafin's gentle smile reminding me that I'm not behaving. But I
had to sit and listen smilingly, and of course show none of my horror
at their attitude, for more muzzling even than being a guest is being
the betrothed of a Prussian officer. _They_ don't know what sort of a
Prussian officer he is, how different, how truly educated, how full of
dislike for the base things they worship and want; and he, caught by
birth in the Prussian chains, shall not be betrayed by me who love him.
Here he is, caught anyhow for the present, and he must do his duty; but
someday we're going away,--he, and I, and you, little mother darling,
when there's no war anywhere in sight and therefore no duty to stay
for, and we'll go and live in America, and he'll take off all those
buttons and spurs and things, and we'll give ourselves up to freedom,
and harmlessness, and art, and beauty, and we'll have friends who
neither intrigue, which is what the class at the top here lives by, nor
who waste their lives being afraid, which is what all the other classes
here spend their lives being.

"At last we are going to wipe off old scores against France," Doctor
Krummlaut spluttered through his soup today at Frau Berg's with shining
eyes,--I should have thought it was France who had the old scores that
need wiping--"and Russia, the barbarian Colossus, will topple over and
choke in its own blood."

Then Frau Berg capped that with sentiments even more bloodthirsty.

Then the Swede, who never used to speak, actually raised her voice in
terms of blood too, and expressed a wish to see a Cossack strung up by
his heels to every electric-light standard along the Lindens.

Then Hilda Seeberg said if her Papa--that Papa she told me