puzzled and distressed.
He feels like a Heliogabalus on a desert isle. He consults his watch. It
is past midnight. He has searched for hours. No famous thoroughfare has
escaped him. He has reconnoitred diligently and thoroughly, as only a
pious tourist bent on forbidden pleasures knows how. He is the arch-type
of American traveller; the God-fearing deacon on the loose; the
vestryman returning from Jerusalem. Hopefully, yet fearfully, he has
pushed his search. He has traversed the Kaerntnerring, the Kolowratring,
peered into Stadt Park, hit the Stubenring, scouted Franz Josefs Kai,
searched the Rotenturmstrasse, zigzagged over to the Schottenring,
followed the Franz, Burg and Opern-Rings, and is back on the Karlsplatz,
still virtuous, still sober!

Not a houri. Nary a carnival. No strain of the "Blaue Donau" has wooed
his ear. No one has nailed him with sachet eggs. He has not been choked
by quarts of confetti. His conscience is as pure as the brews of Munich.
He is still in a beneficent state of primeval and exquisite prophylaxis,
of benign chemical purity, of protean moral asepsis. He came prepared
for deluges of wine and concerted onslaughts from ineffable
_freimaderln_. But he might as well have attended a drama by Charles
Klein for all the rakish romance he has unearthed. His evening has gone.
His legs are weary. And nothing has happened to astound or flabbergast
him, to send him sprawling with Cheyne-Stokes breathing. In all his
promenading he has seen nothing to affect his vasomotor centres or to
produce Argyll-Robertson pupils.

Can it be true, he wonders, that, after all, Viennese gaiety is an
illusion, a base fabrication? Is the _Wiener blut_, like Iowan blood,
calm and sluggish? Is Vienna's reputation bogus, a snare for tourists, a
delusion for the unsophisticated? Where is that far-renowned
_gemuethlichkeit_? Has an American press agent had his foul hand in the
advertising of Austria's capital? Perhaps--perhaps!... But what of those
Viennese operas? What of those sensuous waltzes, those lubric bits of
_schramm-musik_ which have come from Vienna? And has he not seen
pictures of Viennese women--angels _a la mode_, miracles of beauty,
Loreleis _de luxe_? Even Baedeker, the papa of the travelling
schoolmarms, has admitted Vienna to be a bit frivolous.

A puzzle, to be sure. A problem for Copernicus--a paradox, a theorem
with many decimal points. So thinks the tourist, retiring to his hotel.
And figuring thus,