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There was no sympathy expressed for her in her condition, no responsibility felt for her in her downfall or anxiety about her future. Whether she would, from this misstep, have to take to the streets for a living occurred to no one but Kirtley. Germans are little wrought up about such questions. There is no shuddering as from an admitted mortal sin.
The clumsy maneuvering had got down to bargaining. He was mad. He sent the scullery courier back definitely withdrawing all arrangements. The pleasure of his invited guest could not be complicated. Result, the Von Tielitzes did not appear, mother and daughter Bucher remained at home, and Kirtley went with Anderson. The two sat the night out in the box.
The card player would make it himself and all must do him the honor of eating it. He proclaimed in a loud voice that it was the superior of all salads. He had won at cards, the money stuck out of his pockets. He was triumphant and becoming insolent. Kirtley wished he were out of this company. He opened the outside door a moment for fresh air. He noticed that the door had a spring lock.
Hither coursed the smooth brown stream from Bohemia, not far away, through the high fastnesses of the Erz range and the groomed vistas of Saxon Switzerland, and past the frowning old fortress of Königstein, towering near a thousand feet above its untroubled bosom. Kirtley was to find the river, with its carefully tended shores, a companion in many an hour.
It would be a sturdy prop in his long sensitive, susceptible physical recovery and afterward. Was it really not a kind of duty to try to save her from sharing the fate of Von Tielitz, and win her if he could? The Americanization of the Bucher home Kirtley naturally thought beyond all attempts.
Frau Bucher was ecstatic, covering him with her compliments while insisting on waiting for a propitious moment to introduce Herr Kirtley. But as Gard remained there at the lecturer's elbow, he met with another disillusion about German professors. This locally famous man, so correctly dressed to outward view, wore no shirt collar under his beard.
The man of prodigious learning shouted angrily, throwing out his arm toward Kirtley: "Must I repeat that there is a foreigner in the audience? I shall not begin until his presence has been removed." Gard went away, incensed. Surely, he swore to himself, Teuton erudition acts so often like a mad bear ready to claw away at men and things. He never attended another day lecture.
Kirtley concluded that this accounted for the large number of detached young men in Germany in the army and out of it who appeared to be so entirely footloose, ready for any mission or task in any part of the globe.
"Not to play your own national game is it polite, I say?" He flaunted the cards before Gard. "I do not bet," Kirtley repeated as pleasantly as he could, and the tall German tried to quiet his mate. The rain, which had been brewing, presently began to come down and was breaking up the sport. They agreed to dine in the inn and go back to town when the downpour was over.
The unadvised, ordinary people wiped the sweat from their foreheads and said it must be the heat. Kirtley would not have been expected to interpret Friedrich's surprising engagement in the music ranks of the Landwehr as a sign that widespread preparations were being made for the fullest onslaught of which the nation could be capable.
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