While his burgeoning amorousness met with such blighting encouragement in the direction of Fräulein Elsa, it encountered unexpectedly an immense and yearning bosom in another quarter. Fräulein Wasserhaus, next door, clamored for a mate. With cowlike simpleness she almost bellowed out for love. Of an age verging on the precarious she waddled into and out from Villa Elsa with bulging breasts so bared, under the transparent pretenses of white gauze, that Frau Bucher declared herself shocked. She said that the Wasserhaus was trying to be a part of the disgraceful Naked Kultur that had been assailing Germany.
When this bovine soul came to know of Kirtley's presence, she fastened her consuming desires upon him. She had a brother in America and actively developed a hankering to go there and be near him. Yoking up with a Yankee would be a most natural and fitting state in which to negotiate the Atlantic.
As the Bucher wall was too high for her to hang over in her languishing ardors, she hung over her gate to offer a book or a tiger lily to Gard as he passed. Several times when the pachydermatous Tekla banged her way upstairs with an armful of utensils in her work, a bouncing compote or other unabashed delicacy would be tumbling about on a dustpan or a slop basin, bound for the attic room by the linden tree. Twice a belabored missive accompanied these little couriers, anxiously quoting some anguishing sentimentality from one of the household poets writhing amid the pages of the affecting Gartenlaube.
It was at first so bothersome that Gard contemplated leaving the neighborhood. Even the Buchers, truest of prosy Germans, could grasp the ridiculousness of this situation, and it was the one item of noisy fun they could fall back upon when they wished to be especially entertaining.
"Mein Gott!" the Frau would cry out when going over her troubles and arduous occupations. "And I've got to get a husband for the Wasserhaus yet!" The Herr often went into a deafening rage about it.
"Is there no way to keep that lachrymose female out of my house with her belated calf-love? She annoys the good Herr Kirtley." And he would toddle out, slamming the door like a clap of thunder.
The family assumed a very self-conscious behavior when the lorn maiden was mentioned, and were anxious Gard should know that, while unfortunately she was their neighbor, she was not at all of their stratum.
"Poor girl!" Gard mused. There were nearly half again as many women as men in Saxony.
At last he came to know there seemed to be a mystery about Fräulein Elsa—something which was hidden from him. And a new and deeper interest was summoned forth from within his breast. Occasionally at table she was silent as a mile stone. Some days she did not appear to his sight at all. And then, when he did see her, she evidently wanted to avoid him. Very true it was that she often pored over the little volume of Heine in her room without a word to anyone. But, of a sudden, she would become frankly in evidence again—a floral and quite superb girl, resolutely "making good," as was her wont.
"What is it?" Gard wondered.