After breakfast the next morning Ruth met a man of twenty-eight or thirty—tall, reddish-haired, and with small gray eyes by name Christian Wessels, known as a Norwegian gentleman who had made himself agreeable to the Americans at the hotel. He was an ardent admirer of American policies and could repeat verbatim the statement of American war aims given by President Wilson to Congress three months before. He was a young man of culture, having graduated from the Swedish University of Upsala and was now corresponding with the University of Copenhagen. He proved to be a man of cosmopolitan acquaintance who had visited London, New York, San Francisco. He spoke English perfectly; and he nursed profound, personal antipathy to Germany as his family fortunes had suffered enormously through the torpedoing of Norwegian ships; moreover, he himself had been traveling from England to Bergen when his ship was destroyed and he had been exposed to winter weather in an open boat for five days before being picked up. He was only now recuperating from the effects of that exposure, meanwhile carrying on certain economic studies to guide trade relations after the war.
His method of recuperation, Ruth observed, was to eat as heavily and as often as occasions permitted; he was a sleek, sensuous young man, ease-loving and, by his own account, a connoisseur of the arts. He talked informatively about painting, as about politics. Ruth did not like him; but when she encountered him as she was wandering about alone gazing at the quaint houses in the interior of the old town, she could not be too rude to him when he offered himself as a guide.
“You have seen the Kapellbrücke, Miss Gail?”
“Yes; of course,” Ruth said.
“And the historical paintings? You understand them?”
“Yes,” Ruth asserted again.
“To what do they refer?”
“I don’t know,” Ruth admitted, and accompanied him, in no wise offended, back to the old bridge over the Reuss; then to the Mühlenbrücke with its Dance of Death; next he took her away to the Glacier Garden.
While they had been in the town with many people close by, his manner to Ruth had not been unusually offensive; but when they were away alone, he became more familiar and he took to uncovert appraisal of her face and figure.
“You are younger than I had expected,” he commented to her, apropos of nothing which had gone before but his too steady scrutiny of her face and her figure.