one's nose, and mouth and
cheekbones. Do you suppose it's the umlauts?"

"Cut it out!" laughed Ted, that being his idea of modern American slang.
He was fascinated by these crisp phrases, but he was ten years or so
behind the times, and he sometimes startled his hearers by an exhibition
of slang so old as to be almost new. It was all the more startling in
contrast with his conversational English, which was as carefully correct
as a born German's.

As for the rest, it was plain that he was interested, but unhappy. He
practiced for hours daily. He often took Mizzi to the park and came back
storming about the dirt, the noise, the haste, the rudeness, the crowds,
the mismanagement of the entire city. Dummheit, he called it. They
profaned the lake. They allowed the people to trample the grass. They
threw papers and banana skins about. And they wasted! His years in
Germany had taught him to regard all these things as sacrilege, and the
last as downright criminal. He was lonesome for his Germany. That was
plain. He hated it, and loved it, much as he hated and loved the woman
who had so nearly spoiled his life. The maelstrom known as the southwest
corner of State and Madison streets appalled him.

"Gott!" he exclaimed. "Es ist unglaublich! Aber ganz unglaublich! Ich
werde bald veruckt." He somehow lapsed into German when excited.

Fanny took him to the Haynes-Cooper plant one day, and it left
him dazed, and incredulous. She quoted millions at him. He was not
interested. He looked at the office workers, the mail-room girls, and
shook his head, dumbly. They were using bicycles now, with a bundle rack
in the front, in the vast stock rooms, and the roller skates had been
discarded as too slow. The stock boys skimmed around corners on these
lightweight bicycles, up one aisle, and down the next, snatching bundles
out of bins, shooting bundles into bins, as expertly as players in a
gymkhana.

Theodore saw the uncanny rapidity with which the letter-opening machines
did their work. He watched the great presses that turned out the
catalogue--the catalogue whose message meant millions; he sat in
Fenger's office and stared at the etchings, and said, "Certainly," with
politeness, when Fenger excused himself in the midst of a conversation
to pick up the telephone receiver and talk to their shoe factory in
Maine. He ended up finally in Fanny's office, no longer a dingy and
undesirable corner, but a quietly brisk center that sent out vib