Just think,--when I had my lesson yesterday Kloster wouldn't talk
either about the war or the Kaiser. For a long time I thought he was
ill; but he wasn't, he just wouldn't talk. I told him about Friday,
and the Kaiser's "_Geht nach Hause und betet_," and how I had felt
about it and the whole thing, and I expected a flood of illuminating
and instructive and fearless comment from him; and instead he was dumb.
And not only dumb, but he fidgeted while I talked, and at last stopped
me altogether and bade me go on playing.

Then I asked him if he were ill, and he said, "No, why should I be ill?"

"Because you're different,--you don't talk," I said.

And he said, "It is only women who always talk."

So then I got on with my playing, and just wondered in silence.

I ran against Frau Kloster in the passage as I was coming out, and
asked her if there was anything wrong, and she too said, "No, what
should there be wrong?"

"Because the Master's different," I said. "He won't talk."

And she said, "My dear Mees Chrees, these are great days we live in,
and one cannot be as usual."

"But the Master--" I said. "Just these great days--you'd think he'd be
pouring out streams of all the things that most need saying--"

And she shrugged her shoulders and merely repeated, "One is not as
usual."

So I came away, greatly puzzled. I had expected bread, and here I was
going off with nothing but an unaccountable stone. Kloster and Bernd
are the two solitary sane and wise people I know here in this place of
fever, the two I trust, to whom I say what I really think and feel, and
I went to Kloster yesterday athirst for wisdom, for that detached,
critical picking out one by one of the feathers of the imperial bird,
the Prussian eagle, that I find so wholesome, so balance-restoring, so
comforting, in what is now a very great isolation of spirit. And he
was dumb. I can't get over it.

I've not seen Bernd since, as he is frightfully busy and wasn't able to
come yesterday at all, but he's coming to lunch today, and perhaps
he'll be able to explain Kloster. I've been practising all the
morning,--it will seem to you an odd thing to have done while Rome is
burning, but I did it savagely, with a feeling of flinging defiance at
this topsy-turvy world, of slitting its ugliness in spite of itself
with bright spears of music, insisting on intruding loveliness on its
preoccupation, the loveliness created by its own brains in the days
bef