been any pudding left over, and
then treads heavily back again to her bedroom, and shuts herself in
till four o'clock for her _Mittagsruhe_; and the other boarders drift
away one by one, and I run out for a walk to get unstiffened after
having practised all the morning, and as I walk I think over what
they've been saying, and try to see things from their angle, and simply
can't.

On Tuesdays and Fridays I have my lesson, and tell Kloster about them.
He says they're entirely typical of the great bulk of the nation.
"_Wir Deutschen_," he says, and laughs, "are the easiest people in the
world to govern, because we are obedient and inflammable. We have that
obedience of mind so convenient to Authority, and we are inflammable
because we are greedy. Any prospect held out to us of getting
something belonging to some one else sets us instantly alight. Dangle
some one else's sausage before our eyes, and we will go anywhere after
it. Wonderful material for S. M." And he adds a few irreverences.

Last Wednesday was his concert at the Philarmonie. He played like an
angel. It was so strange, the fat, red, more than commonplace-looking
little bald man, with his quite expressionless face, his wilfully
stupid face--for I believe he does it on purpose, that blankness, that
bulgy look of one who never thinks and only eats--and then the heavenly
music. It was as strange and arresting as that other mixture, that
startling one of the men who sell flowers in the London streets and the
flowers they sell. What does it look like, those poor ragged men
shuffling along the kerb, and in their arms, rubbing against their
dirty shoulders, great baskets of beauty, baskets heaped up with
charming aristocrats, gracious and delicate purities of shape and
colour and scent. The strangest effect of all is when they happen,
round about Easter, to be selling only lilies, and the unearthly purity
of the lilies shines on the passersby from close to the seller's
terrible face. Christ must often have looked like that, when he sat
close up to Pharisees.

But although Kloster's music was certainly as beautiful as the lilies,
he himself wasn't like those tragic sellers. It was only that he was
so very ordinary,--a little man compact, apparently, of grossness, and
the music he was making was so divine. It was that marvellous French
and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you
love it. It's like nothing there has ever been.