“Because you don’t think,” he interrupted. “I can tell you that the thought of war is never absent for a single day from the average German mind. We are all soldiers, you see. We start with that. You start by being golfers and cricketers. But ‘der Tag’ is never quite absent from the German mind. I don’t say that all you golfers and cricketers wouldn’t make good soldiers, but you’ve got to be made. You can’t be a golfer one day and a soldier the next.” Michael laughed. “As for that,” he said, “I made an uncommonly bad soldier. But I am an even worse golfer. As for cricket--” Falbe again interrupted. “Ah, then at last I know two things about you,” he said. “You were a soldier and you can’t play golf. I have never known so little about anybody after three--four days. However, what is our proverb? ‘Live and learn.’ But it takes longer to learn than to live. Eh, what nonsense I talk.” He spoke with a sudden irritation, and the laugh at the end of his speech was not one of amusement, but rather of mockery. To Michael this mood was quite inexplicable, but, characteristically, he looked about in himself for the possible explanation of it. “But what’s the matter?” he asked. “Have I annoyed you somehow? I’m awfully sorry.” Falbe did not reply for a moment. “No, you’ve not annoyed me,” he said. “I’ve annoyed myself. But that’s the worst of living on one’s nerves, which is the penalty of Baireuth. There is no charge, so to speak, except for your ticket, but a collection is made, as happens at meetings, and you pay with your nerves. You must cancel my annoyance, please. If I showed it I did not mean to.” Michael pondered over this. “But I can’t leave it like that,” he said at length. “Was it about the possibility of war, which I said was unthinkable?” Falbe laughed and turned on his elbow towards Michael. “No, my dear chap,” he said. “You may believe it to be unthinkable, and I may believe it to be inevitable; but what does it matter what either of us believes? Che sara sara. It was quite another thing that caused me to annoy myself. It does not matter.” Michael lay back on the soft slope. “Yet I insist on knowing,” he said. “That is, I mean, if it is not private.” Falbe lay quietly with his long fingers in the sediment of pine-needles.