axations--whenever we meet the weak, the beneath us, the momentarily
helpless, we are brutal. It is an immense relief to be for a moment
natural. Every German welcomes even the smallest opportunity."

You would be greatly interested in Kloster, I'm certain. He sits
there, his fiddle on his fat little knees, his bow punctuating his
sentences with quivers and raps, his shiny bald head reflecting the
light from the window behind him, and his eyes coming very much out of
his face, which is excessively red. He looks like an amiable prawn;
not in the least like a person with an active and destructive mind, not
in the least like a great musician. He has the very opposite of the
bushy eyebrows and overhanging forehead and deep set eyes and lots of
hair you're supposed to have if you've got much music in you. He came
over to me the other day after I had finished playing, and stretched
up--he's a good bit smaller than I am--and carefully drew his finger
along my eyebrows, each in turn. I couldn't think what he was doing.

"My finger is clean, Mees Chrees," he said, seeing me draw back. "I
have just wiped it, Be not, therefore, afraid. But you have the real
Beethoven brow--the very shape--and I must touch it. I regret if it
incommodes you, but I must touch it. I have seen no such resemblance
to the brow of the Master. You might be his child."

I needn't tell you, darling mother, that I went back to the boarders
and the midday guests not minding them much. If I only could talk
German properly I would have loved to have leant across the table to
Herr Mannfried, an unwholesome looking young man who comes in to dinner
every day from a bank in the Potsdamerstrasse, and is very full of that
hatred which is really passion for England, and has pale hair and a
mouth exactly like two scarlet slugs--I'm sorry to be so horrid, but it
_is_ like two scarlet slugs--and said,--"Have you noticed that I have a
_Beethovenkopf_? What do you think of me, an _Englanderin_, having
such a thing? One of your own great men says so, so it must be true."

We are studying the Bach Chaconne now. He is showing me a different
reading of it, his idea. He is going to play it at the Philarmonie
here next week. I wish you could hear him. He was intending to go to
London this season and play with a special orchestra of picked players,
but has changed his mind. I asked him why, and he shrugged his
shoulder and said his agent, who arranges these