The Countess Brockdorff, who was secretary of the Lodge, looked at him without any great curiosity. Rudolf Steiner was almost forty years old, and his accent had a touch of the lower-Austrian peasant. The pince-nez glasses, attached by a cord, gave him the look of an absent-minded schoolmaster. His smile was friendly but shy. The countess knew that he had written books about Goethe, and lectured about history and politics to the Workers’ Educational Association. He was to lecture that evening on Nietzsche — not entirely a suitable subject for Theosophists, who believed that most of the world’s deepest wisdom came from ancient India, for Nietzsche, after all, was an atheist and an arch-rebel. When Dr Steiner began to lecture, the countess’s doubts seemed justified. His voice was a little monotonous, and his sentences were sometimes abstract and involved. And his own attitude to Nietzsche seemed rather odd. Dr Steiner obviously believed in a spiritual reality underlying the universe, and Nietzsche undoubtedly did not.
