What contrast in language and people! Miss Wooden Shoes was as boyhood pictures made her: and leisurely England, too; but where was the phlegmatic old German with his china-bowl pipe? He realised the energy of the new Germany, galvanised by some higher will of leadership, with the resentment of its _verboten_ system which is inevitable to all Americans who have not been educated in Germany and themselves fallen into step, and particularly to a Sanford of New England. He met Americans wherever he went, in hotels, on trains, and in picture galleries, catered to for the dollars they dropped by the way into open palms, privately criticised for the very liberality which made them welcome, not to mention also for their brusqueness, their air of success and sometimes their spread-eagleism. But they did not care as long as they had the freedom of the playground. European politics or world politics did not concern them, come from the fatness of their new world beyond the seas. The last tourist summer of its kind! Philip studied the newspapers with the help of college German which is good enough on grammar but floundering in passing the time of day. His keen mind began to catch the sense of how an assassination affected that balance of power; he felt the pressure in the air before a cloud burst; the suspense of the sparks running along the fuse from Sarajevo to the powder magazines--but all objectively, with no presage of how subjective it was to become to him. Then one day all the youth of that nation moved as with one thought and purpose, as the football eleven goes onto the gridiron--which was the simple comparison that he made. For forty years they had been drilling for this struggle and all the years and days and hours of the forty years broke in cumulative force for the blow. How it made him think; that a people could act together in this fashion; that a million and two million men could go each to his place as the fireman to his on an alarm! It seemed as if they should sweep all the world before them, like the breaking of a dam down a river bed. Youth was not bothering how to get home. It was on the scene and that was enough. But about Mervaux and seventeenth cousins? Should he see either? While in Berlin he had received so insistent a letter of invitation from Madame Ribot that he had decided to spend less time in Paris and more in Mervaux than originally planned, if it were agreeable. Somehow he got on board a train in Switzerland, and sitting up all night in a stifling second-class compartment he reached Paris. His fellow-passengers were thinking of how to obtain money on letters of credit and how to find berths on a transatlantic steamer. His own passage had already been engaged on a French ship from Havre.