I sat next to one of the new nobility, the Landgrab von Fleissing. He said he was a great reader of English poetry, especially Byron and Mrs. Wilcox: I said neither of them were ever read in England nowadays, and he seemed disappointed; so I asked him whether he read Kipling, which was a fortunate shot: he said “The Beast-mark” was his favourite story. I found he came from Prague, so asked him whether he was a Catholic. He said no, he belonged to the State Church, which broke away from the Catholics in 1920, because they demanded a vernacular liturgy and a married clergy. I asked whether he approved of the married clergy, and he said no, because they did not believe in religion: for himself, he was pious, and thought it was stupid not to believe in God. I explained something of my own doubts, to which he only replied, “Ah, you English, you are so big you get along without him.” On the other side of me was a Russian, whose name I could not catch: he was very proud of his country, which was, he said, the first revolutionary country, and was still a sort of model of revolution to all others. He was very rich, and kept four motor-cars. When I expressed surprise about this, he explained that communism did not mean an equal sharing of all possessions by all the people, but a free opportunity for men’s natural powers of leadership to come out. (I was told afterwards that his came out in the form of holding up a supply of wheat, for which, my informant added, he would certainly have been lynched in America.) He was very enthusiastic about education, which naturally interested me, and I asked him what sort of curriculum the children went through in the elementary schools. He said they learned not to respect the nobility, not to believe in God, not to love their wives, not to obey their parents, not to join the army, and many, many other things. I said it all sounded rather negative, but he could not understand this word; so I said I did not understand why people needed to be _taught_ such things, but he could not see this. The room got very hot towards the end of the proceedings. We sang Auld Lang Syne before we separated. We go back to Munich to-morrow.