United States or Cayman Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When, by his insistent questionings, he learned about the comfortable and illuminating German home where Kirtley had installed himself, and that there was a fine, serious young lady in it with a harvest of straw-colored hair, he soon confessed, after all, to his disappointments. "Kirtley, you are always a lucky dog.
Did she consider him of such an inferior breed? Perhaps, in her misled innocence, she did. Perhaps that was the reason why she acted toward him in an upsetting fashion which only the more tempted a certain tenacious element in his make-up. This astonishing outbreak in Villa Elsa was followed by something still more singular to Kirtley, or at least out of his reckoning.
It's this that we haven't got in America and can't well have under our system. But it's this unified, disciplined zeal that enables two or three ordinary Germans to do what it takes four ordinary Yankees to do. Clad in armor and with a glistening sword in hand, Germania ought to scare men, and they are not taking the warning. "But, Kirtley, it scares me. I feel see something awful coming.
The German called the attendant. The latter did not come. The other hurried into the restaurant and came back waving a deck. "Now I will try to show you. I can't do it well. I have never seen it but once." "Monte," said Gard. It was not the name the German recognized. Kirtley laughed over this old county fair acquaintance. Three card monte under the walls of Charlemagne's church!
Through the garish films of innuendo and braggadocio that day Kirtley was led to behold images of these daughters as if they were languishing to become mates and beating their breasts in their longing to become mothers. He had by no means now forgotten Friedrich's equivocal remarks about Elsa.
This had been a fragment of his erroneous idea that they are active Protestants in the sense that carries any Calvinistic or ethical meaning. Neither the Buchers, nor any of the families whom Kirtley met through them, went to church. The Protestant churches were, in fact, gloomy, tasteless and almost empty. Their services appeared cheerless and forbidding. Tremendous fear was their keynote.
As a result, while the German youngster is early being adapted to a particular future course for which Nature has given him an aptitude, his American competitor is often left to drift through the years without definite ambition, or at least with only a belated or partly drilled preparation therefor." In Germany, Kirtley observed, the Government stood as the real father.
Oddly enough Frau Bucher, despite all her bluntness, never let a hint out of the bag of her franknesses before Kirtley. After Jim Deming's second riotous invasion of Villa Elsa, when there had been confirmed the abject and tumultuous surrender of the two ladies, mind, body and soul, to mere money, prostrate at the feet of an American "pig," Gard experienced a numbness of heart.
To an American student of life and language in Germany she was pictured as absolutely necessary. For, although originally from the Thuringian forest, she spoke the Saxon dialect "shockingly well." Kirtley laughed it off as a part of the ribald fun. The young Germans wound up their list of salutations with Der Tag! "What do you mean by Der Tag?" he inquired. The others grinned significantly.
It doubtless proved to his mind that Americans are only half trained, half tamed, half domesticated. The couple surrounded Kirtley with a protection, an honesty, a reliability, a zeal, that was as surprising as it was, on the whole, gratifying. He felt a security he had hardly known in his own home.
Word Of The Day