“What do you bet she takes No. 52. corsets?” he whispered. “She grew that as a shelf for her bus tickets,” he continued. “If I had a ‘chester’ like that, I could save money.”
After a pause, he turned suddenly on me:
“What is bust in German?”
“Busen,” I translated.
“Male, female, or neuter?”
“Male—der Busen.”
He began slapping his knees with both hands, waggled his head from one side to the other, and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. But he never said another word on that trip.
Two months later the lecture, “The Awful German Tongue,” was delivered. But at the embassy we knew it almost by heart before he came out with it, for he was forever talking genitive case, declinations, definite and indefinite articles, and male, female, or neuter.
ARTIST OR PHOTOGRAPHER
Mr. Clemens had met Lenbach, the eminent German painter, in Vienna, and when, a year or two afterwards, I ran across Mark in Munich, he proposed that we call at Lenbach’s studio. So to Akademie Strasse we went, and duly admired Lenbach’s collections. “Mostly painted kaisers, kings, and kinglets, also one man, W. K. Vanderbilt,” was Mark’s estimate. I saw Lenbach eye Clemens with business in his heart. Mark saw it too. “Wonder if he intends to throw me on the linen, I mean the canvas,” he whispered, while Lenbach was busy in another part of the shop.