into the diningroom where he was waiting among the _debris_
of the first spasms of Wanda's table-laying; and we both laughed.

He said the Master--so he always speaks of Kloster, and with such
affection and admiration in his voice--and his wife were downstairs in
his car, and wanted him to ask me to join them so that he might drive
us all into the country on such a fine day.

You can imagine how quickly I put on my hat.

"It is doing you good already," he said, looking at me as we went down
the four nights of stairs,--so Kloster had been telling him, too, that
story about too much work.

Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he
had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn't get as much talk with
him as I had hoped, for I like him _very_ much, and so would you,
little mother. There is nothing of the aggressive swashbuckler about
him. I'm sure he doesn't push a woman off the pavement when there
isn't room for him.

I don't think I've told you about Frau Kloster, but that is because one
keeps on forgetting she is there. Perhaps that quality of beneficent
invisibleness is what an artist most needs in a wife. She never says
anything, except things that require no answering. It's a great
virtue, I should think, in a wife. From time to time, when Kloster has
_lese majestated_ a little too much, she murmurs _Aber_ Adolf; or she
announces placidly that she has just killed a mosquito; or that the sky
is blue; and Kloster's talk goes on on the top of this little
undercurrent without taking the least notice of it. They seem very
happy. She tends him as carefully as one would tend a baby,--one of
those quite new pink ones that can't stand anything hardly without
crumpling up,--and competently clears life round him all empty and
free, so that he has room to work. I wish I had a wife.

We drove out through Potsdam in the direction of Brandenburg, and
lunched in the woods at Potsdam by the lake the Marmor Palais is on.
Kloster stared at this across the water while he ate, and the sight of
it tinged his speech regrettably. Herr von Inster, as an officer of
the King, ought really to have smitten him with the flat side of his
sword, but he didn't; he listened and smiled. Perhaps he felt as the
really religious do about God, that the Hohenzollerns are so high up
that criticism can't harm them, but I doubt it; or perhaps he regards
Kloster indulgently, as a gifted and wayward child, but I doubt