the eleventh is a Swede and doesn't say anything. And the ten Germans,
including Frau Berg, all fix their eyes reproachfully on me while as
one man they tell me how awful my country is. Do people in London
boarding houses tell the German boarders how awful Germany is, I
wonder? I don't believe they do. And I wish they would leave me alone
about the Boer war. I've tried to explain my extreme youth at the time
it was going on, but they still appear to hold me directly responsible
for it. The fingers that have been pointed at me down that table on
account of the Boer war! They raise them at me, and shake them, and
tell me of the terrible things the English did, and when I ask them how
they know, they say it was in the newspapers; and when I ask them what
newspapers, they say theirs; and when I ask them how they know it was
true, they say they know because it was in the newspapers. So there we
are, stuck. I take to English when the worst comes to the worst, and
they flounder in after me.

It is the funniest thing, their hostility to England, and the queer,
reluctant, and yet passionate admiration that goes With it. It is like
some girl who can't get a man she admires very much to notice her. He
stays indifferent, while she gets more exasperated the more indifferent
he stays; exasperated with the bitterness of thwarted love. One day at
dinner, when they had all been thumping away at me, this flashed across
me as the explanation, and I exclaimed in English, "Why, you're in love
with us!"

Twenty round eyes stared at me, sombrely at first, not understanding,
and then with horror slowly growing in them.

"In love with you? In love with England?" cried Frau Berg, the carving
knife suspended in the air while she stared at me. "_Nein, aber so