had a birthday three days ago,
and there was a heavenly cake at it, a great flat thing with cream in
it, that one loved so that first one wanted to eat it and then to sit
on it and see all the cream squash out at the sides; but evidently the
cake is the one thing you don't have for your birthday after you are
dead. I don't want to laugh, darling mother, and I know well enough
what it is to lose one's beloved Dad, but you see Hilda had shown me
her family photographs only the other day, for we are making friends in
a sort of flabby, hesitating way, and when she got to the one of her
father she said with perfect frankness that she hadn't liked him, and
that it had been an immense relief when he died. "He prevented my
doing anything," she said, frowning at the photograph, "except that
which increased his comforts."

I asked Kloster about anniversaries when I went for my lesson on
Friday. He is a very human little man, full of sympathy,---the sort of
comprehending sympathy that laughs and understands together, yet his
genius seems to detach him from other Germans, for he criticizes them
with a dispassionate thoroughness that is surprising. The remarks he
makes about the Kaiser, for instance, whom he irreverently alludes to
as S. M.--(short and rude for _Seine Majestat_)--simply make me shiver
in this country of _lese majeste_. In England, where we can say what
we like, I have never heard anybody say anything disrespectful about
the King. Here, where you go to prison if you laugh even at officials,
even at a policeman, at anything whatever in buttons, for that is the
punishable offence of Beamtenbeleidigung--haven't they got heavenly
words--Kloster and people I have come across in his rooms say what they
like; and what they like is very rude indeed about that sacred man the
Kaiser, who doesn't appear to be at all popular. But then Kloster
belongs to the intelligents, and his friends are all people of
intelligence, and that sort of person doesn't care very much, I think,
for absolute monarchs. Kloster says they're anachronisms, that the
world is too old for them, too grown-up for pretences and decorations.
And when I went for my lesson on Friday I found his front door wreathed
with evergreens and paper flowers,--pretences and decorations crawling
even round Kloster--and I went in very reluctantly, not knowing what
sort of a memorial celebration I was going to tumble into. But it was
only that his wife--I didn't know