"You remember my telling you about Miss Becker, the German girl that I used to be at Westminster with, when we used to call ourselves the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker? Well, what _do_ you think? She has been _taken away_ from her boarding-house where she was in Bloomsbury, and interned in some camp as an alien enemy, although she is a girl, and they say she _nearly_ was just on trial _as a spy_!
"Mabel Butcher wrote and told me about it. She (Miss Butcher) went with Ottilie Baker when she had to register herself as an alien at Somerset House, just after the War broke out, and she said it was _awful_, a great place like six National Galleries rolled into one, and _miles_ of immense long corridors, and _simply crowds_ of all kinds of Germans and Austrians, just like a queue at the theatre, waiting to be registered, and all looking scared to _death_, quite a lot of pretty girls among them, too.
"Poor Ottilie Becker cried like anything at having to go, and to be an enemy alien, you know she'd got such heaps of friends in England and liked lots of English ways. She used to have a bath every morning, even. I hate to think of _her_ being a prisoner. Of course I know one ought to feel that all Germans ought to be wiped out now," wrote Gwenna, "but it makes you feel sort of different when it's a girl you've _known_ and had lots of little jokes with, and I was with her the very first time I heard of _you_, so I shan't be able to help always feeling a little kinder about her.
"The reason she was arrested was because they found in her room at the boarding-house a lot of notes about the engineering-works, our works, which she had been going to send off to that soldier-brother of hers, Karl. She declared _she_ didn't know she wasn't supposed to, and that she hadn't an _idea_ of our going to War with her country or anything, and I'm _sure_ she didn't _mean_ any harm at all. She said she'd seen her brother Karl in England the week before War was declared, and that _he_ hadn't said a word to her then. And so perhaps he _was_ that waiter all the time. You know, the one we saw, in the cab that last Sunday of peace-time. I expect _he_ is fighting us now, isn't it _extraordinary_?"