In the early morning, winter and summer, he emerged into the small side porch of his cottage and there threw over himself a pail of cold water from the well outside. Then he rubbed down, dressed in the open air behind the old awning hung there, took a dozen deep breaths and a cup of coffee, and was off for work. The addition of a bathroom, with running hot water, had made no change in his daily habits.
He was very strict with Anna, and with the women who, one after another, kept house for him.
“I'll have no men lounging around,” was his first instruction on engaging them. And to Anna his solicitude took the form almost of espionage. The only young man he tolerated about the place was a distant relative. Rudolph Klein.
On Sunday evenings Rudolph came in to supper. But even Rudolph found it hard to get a word with the girl alone.
“What's eating him, anyhow,” he demanded of Anna one Sunday evening, when by the accident of a neighbor calling old Herman to the gate, he had the chance of a word.
“He knows a lot about you fellows,” Anna had said. “And the more he knows the less he trusts you. I don't wonder.”
“He hasn't anything on me.”
But Anna had come to the limit of her patience with her father at last.
“What's the matter with you?” she demanded angrily one night, when Herman had sat with his pipe in his mouth, and had refused her permission to go to the moving-pictures with another girl. “Do you think I'm going on forever like this, without a chance to play? I'm sick of it. That's all.”
“You vill not run around with the girls on this hill.” He had conquered all but the English “w.” He still pronounced it like a “v.”