e down what
would be my beard if I had one. And I choke over the rolls, and I
spill things in my hurry to run away and talk to you. I got another
letter from you yesterday, and Hilda Seeberg, a girl boarding here and
studying painting, said when she met me in the passage after I had been
reading it in my room, "You have had a letter from your _Frau Mutter,
nicht_?" So you see your letters shine in my face.

Don't be afraid I won't take enough exercise. I go for an immense walk
directly after dinner every day, a real quick hot one through the
Thiergarten. The weather is fine, and Berlin I suppose is at its best,
but I don't think it looks very nice after London. There's no mystery
about it, no atmosphere; it just blares away at you. It has everything
in it that a city ought to have,--public buildings, statues, fountains,
parks, broad streets; and it is about as comforting and lovable as the
latest thing in workhouses. It looks disinfected; it has just that
kind of rather awful cleanness.

At dinner they talk of its beauty and its perfections till I nearly go
to sleep. You know how oddly sleepy one gets when one isn't
interested. They've left off being silent now, and have gone to the
other extreme, and from not talking to me at all have jumped to talking
to me all together. They tell me over and over again that I'm in the
most beautiful city in the world. You never knew such eagerness and
persistence as these German boarders have when it comes to praising
what is theirs, and also when it comes to criticizing what isn't
theirs. They're so funny and personal. They say, for instance, London
is too hideous for words, and then they look at me defiantly, as though
they had been insulting some personal defect of mine and meant to
brazen it out. They point out the horrors of the slums to me as though
the slums were on my face. They tell me pityingly what they look like,
what terrible blots and deformities they are, and how I--they say
England, but no one could dream from their manner that it wasn't
me--can never hope to be regarded as fit for self-respecting European
society while these spots and sore places are not purged away.

The other day they assured me that England as a nation is really unfit
for any decent other nation to know politically, but they added, with
stiff bows in my direction, that sometimes the individual inhabitant of
that low-minded and materialistic country is not without amiability,
esp