Tuesday, June 28:
Not a very good night for R.; all the same, a walk, with Rakoczy water and breakfast in the garden. Lulu again and again, and complaints about the climate, and concern over people's incompetence, which has obliged us today to have poor, beautiful Molly clipped. R. dictates to me a letter to the veterinary surgeon. It is cold in the evening, and R. feels it severely. But we go through the first scene of Parsifal with great delight.
Yesterday R. praised Siegfried's gentle will: "He is a good boy," he said, "he has a gentle will, but at the same time he is lively, and so good-natured and sensible." Also the way he is musical and whistles everything, but has no desire to learn the piano; R. says it reminds him of himself in his youth.
Of the girls he says they are now no longer children: what we have is the flower, no longer the bud. A theory about the stars amuses him: if the light we see from stars is now several thousand years old, he says, then they must be seeing us as we were at the time of Abraham.
Over our after-lunch coffee the talk was of Bismarck and the jovial spirit in which all our interests are being pursued; R. says he no longer has the slightest interest in any of it.