She was a pure and very worth-while girl. He could not ignore that her healthful, productive example was a stimulus to him. It would be a sturdy prop in his long sensitive, susceptible physical recovery—and afterward. Was it really not a kind of duty to try to save her from sharing the fate of Von Tielitz, and win her if he could?
CHAPTER XIX
Jim Deming of Erie, Pay.
THE Americanization of the Bucher home Kirtley naturally thought beyond all attempts. Its detestation of the low-born Yankee, with only his sorry millions, seemed too deeply planted there, especially in the brain and bosom of the Frau. Could Villa Elsa have been transferred to the United States, such a viewpoint might perhaps have been altered after a time. But this representative boorish German family, stuck here on the rainy banks of the mid-continent Elbe and so rooted and clamorous in the presumption that they and their kind were eclipsing the earth—how impossible of any conversion?
Gard had at first the idea of getting together some American statistics and showing the Buchers a few facts. Then he saw this was hopeless. They accepted nothing that did not come through their own official channels. And why should he waste time on these obscure people? Why should he undertake to upset their racial happiness? Nobody, least of all he, could change their attitude about the upstart Yankee and his upstart dollars. The Buchers held themselves too far above mere money and its filth.
But the miracle was, nevertheless, to be accomplished, at least for awhile, in a manner as simple as it was unlooked for. And this was what happened.
One day, soon after Gard's disillusioning call on Von Tielitz, he was grubbing in his attic among the ninth century roots of the future super-luxuriant Teuton forest, when he heard Tekla's woodchopper feet pounding their way upstairs. A card was thrust in. James Alexander Deming, Erie, Pa. Well, of all the world! The next moment he was there in the room, talkative, airy, sunny, dressed with the obvious American consciousness of having just left the hands of his fashionable tailor and haberdasher. Every section of his black hair and tiny black mustache was plastered down as always in correct position.
Making himself right at home with his newly acquired cosmopolitanism, Jim explained how he was already settled in Dresden for the winter.