and so movable. Portable, I might say, seeing how little you are and
how big I am.

But you know, darling mother, it makes it easier for me to harden and
look ahead with my chin in the air rather than over my shoulder back at
you when I see, as I do see all day long, the extreme sentimentality of
the Germans. It is very surprising. They're the oddest mixture of
what really is a brutal hardness, the kind of hardness that springs
from real fundamental differences from ours in their attitude towards
life, and a squashiness that leaves one with one's mouth open. They
can't bear to let a single thing that has happened to them ever,
however many years ago, drop away into oblivion and die decently in its
own dust. They hold on to it, and dig it out that day year and that
day every year, for years apparently,--I expect for all their lives.
When they leave off really feeling about it--which of course they do,
for how can one go on feeling about a thing forever?--they start
pretending that they feel. Conceive going through life clogged like
that, all one's pores choked with the dust of old yesterdays. I
picture the Germans trailing through life more and more heavily as they
grow old, hauling an increasing number of anniversaries along with
them, rolling them up as they go, dragging at each remove a lengthening
chain, as your dear Goldsmith says,--and if he didn't, or it wasn't,
you'll rebuke me and tell me who did and what it was, for you know I've
no books here, except those two that are married as securely on one's
tongue as Tennyson and Browning, or Arnold Bennet and his, I imagine
reluctant, bride, H. G. Wells,--I mean Shakespeare and the Bible.


I went into Hilda Seeberg's room the other day to ask her for some
pins, and found her sitting in front of a photograph of her father, a