is
unbalanced by a monumental vanity--arrogance--egotism.

"When your Frau is so busily sewing, she is sewing for her
household, it is true, but she is consciously and unconsciously
sewing for Wilhelm. When your Fraeulein goes out to her etching
lesson, she is aware of being of the magnificent German people, and
shares a part of the national ambition to excel. It's this that we
haven't got in America and can't well have under our system. But
it's this unified, disciplined zeal that enables two or three
ordinary Germans to do what it takes four ordinary Yankees to do.
Clad in armor and with a glistening sword in hand, Germania ought to
scare men, and they are not taking the warning.

"But, Kirtley, it scares me. I feel--see--something awful coming. In
the universal German hate, the national boundary stops any flow
outward of sympathy, good faith, equity. All peoples outside are
human insects whom it is proper for the Teuton to tread on if he
can, crush the life out of, because they are in his pathway to
glory."

Kirtley, who had stared at his new friend in this solemnity, turned
a serious face toward the clawlike branches of his linden in its
gauntness of late autumn-tide. This meaning of the animus that was
impelling his odd and yet so normal German household, he began to
see, was substantiated by a score of acts and attitudes in its daily
life. He scarcely deemed it proper to tell of them.

Besides, he did not want to fire up Anderson who already was so
unsettled, so comfortless, on the subject. But Kirtley was reasoning
out how this animus gave a solidity, a solidarity, to the German
household--a satisfied contentment--because it was working toward a
definite racial goal. Any such incentive was almost absent in the
American family.

"And so," wound up Anderson with epigrams, "the years will be left
humanity to weep these days of _insouciance_ and neglect. You can
see that Germany is a man-made nation. It is not the kind God or
Nature would make. God must have turned His face when the Teuton
species was manufactured. Germany is like a man-made hot air
register. When it isn't throwing up hot air, it is throwing up cold
air. It is always throwing up."

To change the somewhat painful theme, Kirtley soon began:

"I don't see any sports--such as we know them--in Germany. How do
they get along without them?" Like all Yankee college men he was
alert on these lines.

"No sports in Deutschland. Go out on the Dresden