! 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
violins hang high up on to a shrill, intolerably eager note. There's a
sort of fever. And the big words! I thought Germans were stolid,
quiet people. But how they talk! And always in capital letters. They
talk in tremendous capitals about what they call the _deutscke
Standpunkt_; and the _deutsche Standpunkt_ is the most wonderful thing
you ever came across. Butter wouldn't melt in its mouth. It is too
great and good, almost, they give one to understand, for a world so far
behind in high qualities to appreciate. No other people has anything
approaching it. As far as I can make out, stripped of its decorations
its main idea is that what Germans do is right and what other people do
is wrong. Even when it is exactly the same thing. And also, that
wrong becomes right directly it has anything to do with Germans. Not
with _a_ German. The individual German can and does commit every sort
of wrong, just as other individuals do in other countries, and he gets
punished for them with tremendous harshness; Kloster says with
unfairness. But directly he is in the plural and becomes _Wir
Deutschen_, as they are forever saying, his crimes become virtues. As
a body