"Yes, I can—yes, I can. Here's a little compilation and analysis of the irregular verbs," explained his new acquaintance, pulling a green brochure from his pocket. "Only costs a mark. You can get a second-hand one at the book stalls by the Augustus bridge. I always carry it with me and con it over and over. Good for the pronunciation. If you get the irregular verbs of a language well fed into your system, you've got the language by the windpipe.
"Then buy Simplicissimus. You'll pick up a good deal from that—the popular expressions, the phrases and exclamations that are going. If you learn to use the exclamations, it makes you interesting and well-liked. It gives the other fellow the chance to do the talking. Simplicissimus and that kind of thing are better than the dry, stilted German classics—'Ekkehard,' 'Nathan der Weise' and all that discarded stuff. But remember that esprit was not given the Germans, because it would hide their Boeotian stupidity."
"I haven't yet seen—I suppose I shall see"—said Kirtley, "why the general American student like me is so persistently encouraged to come to Germany. Why is it?"
"Because we are damn fools," heartily rejoined Anderson. "The Germans don't have education. They have instruction. The one makes gentlemen. The other makes experts. It is hard for an expert to be a gentleman. They don't have gentlemen in Germany. No such word in their language. It is a nation of experts, but that's precisely the reason it should be feared. Why, education would teach a German not to slobber at his meals.
"It is his strenuous ingrowing instruction that cultivates his extreme national egotism until it has become like a boil. His racial egoism helps obscure the obscure sunlight here in Germany and blinds him. He has to wear spectacles. It is a natural cry, his cry for a place in the sun."
"Should I have gone to England or France?" suggested Gard.
"Yes. At any rate, not here. The German procedure roughens the fiber and lowers the moral standards of the general student. Instruction here is along mental and manual lines. The Teuton is meant to be a specialist. He is competent but not refined."
The two compatriots gossiped along about this and that.
"I'm having a devil of a time sleeping on my bed," confessed Gard. "You ought to know about German beds. How do you get on with them?"
"The German bed helps to give the German his bad disposition. I put two beds side by side and sleep across the middle. That's one way to fool the German bed. If I saw yours I might be able to suggest something."