d, and passed
one another, unscathed. I stood in the doorway, fascinated, until
Herr Knapf spied me, took a nimble skip in my direction, twisted the
discouraged mustaches into temporary sprightliness, and waved me toward
a table in the center of the room.

Then a frightful thing happened. When I think of it now I turn cold.
The battery was not that of women's eyes, but of men's. And conversation
ceased! The uproar and the booming of vowels was hushed. The silence was
appalling. I looked up in horror to find that what seemed to be millions
of staring blue eyes were fixed on me. The stillness was so thick that
you could cut it with a knife. Such men! Immediately I dubbed them
the aborigines, and prayed that I might find adjectives with which to
describe their foreheads.

It appeared that the aborigines were especially favored in that they
were all placed at one long, untidy table at the head of the room.
The rest of us sat at small tables. Later I learned that they were
all engineers. At meals they discuss engineering problems in the most
awe-inspiring German. After supper they smoke impossible German pipes
and dozens of cigarettes. They have bulging, knobby foreheads and
bristling pompadours, and some of the rawest of them wear wild-looking
beards, and thick spectacles, and cravats and trousers that Lew Fields
never even dreamed of. They are all graduates of high-sounding foreign
universities and are horribly learned and brilliant, but they are the
worst mannered lot I ever saw.

In the silence that followed my entrance a red-cheeked maid approached
me and asked what I would have for supper. Supper? I asked. Was not
dinner served in the evening? The aborigines nudged each other and
sniggered like fiendish little school-boys.

The red-cheeked maid looked at me pityingly. Dinner was served in the
middle of the day, naturlich. For supper there was Wienerschnitzel, and
kalter Aufschnitt, also Kartoffel Salat, and fresh Kaffeekuchen.

The room hung breathless on my decision. I wrestled with a horrible
desire to shriek and run. Instead I managed to mumble an order. The
aborigines turned to one another inquiringly.

"Was hat sie gesagt?" they asked. "What did she say?" Whereupon they
fell to discussing my hair and teeth and eyes and complexion in German
as crammed with adjectives as was the rye bread over which I was choking
with caraway. The entire table watched me with wide-eyed, unabashed
interest while I ate, and I a