"The chicken?"

"Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?"

I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the aborigines. It used to
fuss me to death to meet one of them in the halls. They always stopped
short, brought heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist,
and thundered: "Nabben', Fraulein!"

I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly, and even the
wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed aborigine cannot startle me.
Nonchalantly I reply, "Nabben'," and wish that Norah could but see me in
the act.

When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed a little and
shrugged his shoulders and said:

"Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and so unmarried. In
Germany a married woman brushes her hair quite smoothly back, and pins
it in a hard knob. And she knows nothing of such bewildering collars
and fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do you call
them--jabots?"

Von Gerhard has not behaved at all nicely. I did not see him until two
weeks after my arrival in Milwaukee, although he telephoned twice to ask
if there was anything that he could do to make me comfortable.

"Yes," I had answered the last time that I heard his voice over the
telephone. "It would be a whole heap of comfort to me just to see you.
You are the nearest thing to Norah that there is in this whole German
town, and goodness knows you're far from Irish."

He came. The weather had turned suddenly cold and he was wearing a
fur-lined coat with a collar of fur. He looked most amazingly handsome
and blond and splendidly healthy. The clasp of his hands was just as big
and sure as ever.

"You have no idea how glad I am to see you," I told him. "If you had,
you would have been here days ago. Aren't you rather ill-mannered and
neglectful, considering that you are responsible for my being here?"

"I did not know whether you, a married woman, would care to have me
here," he said, in his composed way. "In a place like this people are
not always kind enough to take the trouble to understand. And I would
not have them raise their eyebrows at you, not for--"

"Married!" I laughed, some imp of willfulness seizing me, "I'm not
married. What mockery to say that I am married simply because I must
write madam before my name! I am not married, and I shall talk to whom I
please."

And then Von Gerhard did a surprising thing. He took two great steps
over to my chair, and grasped my hands and pulled me to my feet.