all--the German who was
taken to be civilized in heart and spirit as other men are? These
law-abiding, stay-at-home people had deliberately grown in Villa
Elsa this robust plant of contempt, so full-blossomed now and ready
to exhale its noisome fumes which at moments almost stifled Kirtley
with their poison. What would Rebner say to this with his golden,
soul-felt opinions of the excelling race!

This hospitable and apparently harmless domicile was, in reality,
like a martial encampment. Gard could not but conclude that he would
have to leave Loschwitz. How could he for a moment stay in face of
these direct and hard-fisted attacks? And certainly Villa Elsa would
not want to harbor a hog any longer. The similar households he had
come to know, all such households, unquestionably bore the same
furious grudges against the western hemisphere.

But Elsa? How could he leave her--like this? She was the first girl
to excite seriously his affections. She seemed to strike the note of
whatever was truly earnest in him. Yet did she, too, think Americans
were pigs? Did she consider him of such an inferior breed? Perhaps,
in her misled innocence, she did. Perhaps that was the reason why
she acted toward him in an upsetting fashion which only the more
tempted a certain tenacious element in his make-up.

CHAPTER XIV

AFTERMATH

This astonishing outbreak in Villa Elsa was followed by something
still more singular to Kirtley, or at least out of his reckoning. It
was to stir the depths of his contemplations and comparisons and
give him the sharpest look into German character he had yet
received. It was to show him that a gaping abyss might be separating
the Teuton from other western humanity. Having latterly doubted that
the race was easy of sympathetic grasp, any true kinship, he now
profoundly realized that instead of being able to approach it nearer
in feeling the more he knew it, he was encountering very high cliffs
that threatened forever to mark an inaccessible boundary line.

He had taken it for granted that the anti-American outburst would
end the Buchers' relations with him. He must have turned out to be
very unwelcome. The very sight of him as one of the American pigs
about the house must have been most unsatisfactory, distasteful.
They could not from now on visibly wish him or any Yankee in their
home. Their personal dignity could not permit their assault to be
backed up afterward by any equivocal conduct toward