“Don’t trouble,” I protested. “I had dinner at Metz.”
“Yes, but that was four hours ago. Some milk and eggs, at least?”
“Eggs,” I queried, “and milk? I thought there were none in Germany.”
“Doch,” she replied, with a sage glance, “if you know where to look for them, and can get there. I have just been out in the country. I came on the same train you did. But it is hard to get much. Every one goes out scouring the country now. And one must have money. An egg, one mark! Before the war they were never so much a dozen.”
The eggs were fresh enough, but the milk was decidedly watery, and in place of potatoes there was some sort of jellied turnip, wholly tasteless. While I ate, the daughter talked incessantly, the mother now and then adding a word, the grandmother nodding approval at intervals, with a wrinkled smile. All male members of the family had been lost in the war, unless one counts the second fiancée of the daughter, now an officer “over in Germany,” as she put it. When I started at the expression she smiled:
“Yes, here we are in America, you see. Lucky for us, too. There will never be any robbery and anarchy here, and over there it will get worse. Anyhow, we don’t feel that the Americans are real enemies.”
“No?” I broke in. “Why not?”
“Ach!” she said, evasively, throwing her head on one side, “they ... they.... Now if it had been the French, or the British, who had occupied Trier.... At first the Americans were very easy on us—too easy” (one felt the German religion of discipline in the phrase). “They arrived on December first, at noon, and by evening every soldier had a sweetheart. The newspapers raged. It was shameful for a girl to give herself for a box of biscuits, or a cake of chocolate, or even a bar of soap! But they had been hungry for years, and not even decency, to say nothing of patriotism, can stand out against continual hunger. Besides, the war—ach! I don’t know what has come over the German woman since the war!
“But the Americans are stricter now,” she continued, “and there are new laws that forbid us to talk to the soldiers—on the street....”
“German laws?” I interrupted, thoughtlessly, for, to tell the truth, my mind was wandering a bit, thanks either to the heat of the porcelain stove or to her garrulousness, equal to that of any méridionale from southern France.