30, when we had the pension breakfast; and
the rest of the day was taken up by literature, drawing and other
lessons. I went to concerts or the opera by myself every night.
One day Frau von Mach came to me greatly disdressed by a letter
she had received from my mother begging her to take in no men
lodgers while I was in the pension, as some of her friends in
England had told her that I might elope with a foreigner. To this
hour I do not know whether my mother was serious; but I wrote and
told her that Frau von Mach's life depended on her lodgers, that
there was only one permanent lodger--an old American called
Loring, who never spoke to me--and that I had no time to elope.
Many and futile were the efforts to make me return home; but,
though I wrote to England regularly, I never alluded to any of
them, as they appeared childish to me.
I made great friends with Frau von Mach and in loose moments sat
on her kitchen-table smoking cigarettes and eating black cherries;
we discussed Shakespeare, Wagner, Brahms, Middlemarch, Bach and
Hegel, and the time flew.
One night I arrived early at the Opera House and was looking about
while the fiddles were tuning up. I wore my pearls and a scarlet
crepe-de-chine dress and a black cloth cape with a hood on it,
which I put on over my head when I walked home in the rain. I was
having a frank stare at the audience, when I observed just
opposite me an officer in a white uniform. As the Saxon soldiers
wore pale blue, I wondered what army he could belong to.
Pages:
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123