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She made very few mistakes in her estimates of the people who came to her shop. She had made, she was sure, no mistake in trusting Ulrich Stölle. Jean and Derry motoring to Chevy Chase were far away from the world of the Toy Shop. As they whirled along the country roads the bare trees seemed to bud and bloom for them, the sky was gold.
In the afternoon Ulrich Stölle arrived, bearing the inevitable tissue paper parcel. "Do you know what day it is?" he asked. "Thursday." "There are always Thursdays. But this is a special Thursday." "Is it?" "And you ask me like that? It is a Thursday for valentines." "Of course. But how could you expect me to remember? Nobody ever sends me valentines." "My father has sent you one."
It seemed to her, as she talked, that these adventures with Ulrich Stölle were in every way the most splendid thing that had happened to her. They were always unexpected, and they were packed to the brim with pleasure of a rare quality. When they reached their destination, Ulrich took her at once to the hothouses.
She spoke without self-consciousness, and McKenzie's mind was on his own matters, so they swept away from the subject of Ulrich Stölle. "Emily," Bruce said, "I have my orders. Tomorrow at twelve I must leave for France." She gazed at him stupidly. "Tomorrow ?" "Yes." "But Jean ?" "I haven't told her. I don't know how to tell her." "You won't be here for the wedding ?" "No."
"And I am all this, Bruce, I am young and beautiful and all the rest, because I am seeing myself through the eyes of my lover. "He is Ulrich Stölle, as I have said, and you mustn't think because his name is German that he is to be cast into outer darkness. He is as American as you with your Scotch blood, or as I with my English blood. And he is as loyal as any of us.
But now he sits in his chair and works at his toys." The workshop of Franz Stölle was entered through the door of the last hothouse; he had thus always a vista of splashing color red and purples and yellows great stretches, and always with the green to rest his eyes; with the door opened between there came to him the fragrance, and the singing of birds, and the sound of the little stream.
I know that you are offering me more in many ways than Ulrich Stölle. I don't like his name, because something rises up in me against Teuton blood and Teuton nomenclature. But he loves me, and you do not, and because of his love for me and mine for him, everything else seems too small to consider.
"I am going to be very frank with you, Bruce, because in being frank with you I shall be frank with myself. If Ulrich Stölle had not come into my life, I should probably have thought I cared for you. Even now when I am saying 'no, I realize that your charm has always held me, and that the prospect of a future by your pleasant fireside holds many attractions.
One had already seen his name; a near-sighted fellow went searching from table to table; and here and there one boy called to another to point out what his sharp eyes had detected. On every table stood a Stolle, the Saxon Christmas bread called in Keilhau Schuttchen, and a large plate of nuts and cakes, the gift of the institute.
He is an old man, Fräulein, and his mind goes back to the Germany which sang and told fairy tales, and made toys; do you see? "Yet there are people here who do not understand, who point their fingers at him, at me. Who think because I am Ulrich Stölle that I am not American. Yet what am I but that?" He got up and walked around the room restlessly. "I am an American.
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