“Please, Peter!”
“Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?”
“She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them.”
“For instance?”
“Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes.”
“Never owned anything taxable except a dog—and that wasn't a tax anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or surgery, where I'd be of some use?”
“She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties.”
“Well, I've got something to say on that.” He pulled from his overcoat pocket a largish bundle—Peter always bulged with packages—and held it out for her to see. “Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my compliments,” he said, “that because some idiot at home sent me five pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here, I have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty. I offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it.”
“Really, Peter?”
“Really.”