were
small features at all times.

There was no particular provision for the maid. Gard scarcely knew
where or how she slept. Tekla dressed with unconcern in the kitchen
and in the hall. Servant girls were rather considered like calves
and therefore entitled to scant human consideration. The odors, the
unsightly colors, the clatter of the German home, gave further
evidence of the absence of sensitiveness, of any fine and balanced
poise of nerves.

This repulsiveness of existence, of course, did not affect the
audible consciousness of the family about their representing the
most progressive state of civilized man. And not to be forgotten was
the German ill-temperedness, which was pronounced in the morning,
and did not wear off considerably until stomachs were filled during
the day. All these facts testified that the Teuton little cultivates
loveliness in human contact. Beauty of living is not, with him, a
natural end to attain.

After awhile it came over Kirtley that the Buchers showed no
interest in his antecedents or in his country. Their apparent
ignorance of America was rivaled by their indifference about it.
They evidently were of the firm conclusion that there was nothing
worth while there to learn, nothing worthy of attention. It was, to
them, an unprofitable jumble of peoples and things in a rudimentary,
unvarnished state of development. It was Patagonia trying to copy
the ways of Europe. This was but a feature of the Teuton tribal
belief that all the racial evolutions outside the German borders
were undesirable, demoralizing and mischievously blocking the
outspread of _Kultur_.

Gard could not but know of the limited income on which existence
went on at Villa Elsa. It was characteristic. Though limited, the
income was _secure_. Despite the economies practiced, the prevailing
confidence and self-satisfaction did not suffer, as a result, the
slightest impairment. It was significantly German.

Gard said to himself:

"There are here none of the spectacular ups and downs, everlasting
sudden changes and movings to and fro, riches one year, poverty the
next, the unsettledness and acute money misfortunes, that make up so
large a share of our feverish, restless, uncertain Yankee careers.
There does not seem to be a synonym for 'hard up' in German. As for
us Americans the habitual changes of location of the household, the
separation of the parents for reasons of business, travel, or
inharmonious temperaments, th