When I crossed to their table I found Smith still growling while he tried to find his lost place in the New York stock market in his London newspaper. My appearance was the occasion for a full recital of his wrongs, in that amusing hyperbole which is so refreshing in all the Smiths I know. He begged me to survey the table, that I might enjoy his triumph in having been able to surmount local prejudice and procure for himself what he called a breakfast of civilized food. The continental breakfast was to him an odious thing: he announced his intention of exposing it; he meant to publish its iniquity to the world and drive it out of business. Mrs. Smith laughed nervously. She appeared anxious and distraught and I was smitten with pity for her. But there was a twinkle in Miss Smith’s eye, a smile about her pretty lips, that discounted heavily the paternal fury. She communicated, with a glance, a sense of her own attitude toward her father’s indignation: it did not matter a particle; it was merely funny, that was all, that her father, who demanded and commanded all things on his own soil, should here be helpless to obtain a drop of cold water with which to slake his thirst when every one knew that he could have bought the hotel itself with a scratch of the pen. When Smith asked me to account for the prevalence of hydrophobia in Europe it was really for the joy of hearing his daughter laugh. And it is well worth anyone’s while to evoke laughter from Fanny. For Fanny is one of the prettiest girls in the world, one of the cleverest, one of the most interesting and amusing. II As we lingered at the table (water with ice having arrived and the Stars and Stripes flying triumphantly over the pitcher), I was brought up to date as to the recent history of the Smiths. As an old neighbor from home they welcomed me to their confidence. The wife and daughter had been abroad a year with Munich as their chief base. Smith’s advent had been unexpected and disturbing. Rest and change having been prescribed, he had jumped upon a steamer and the day before our encounter had joined his wife and daughter in Berlin. They were waiting now for a conference with a German neurologist to whom Smith had been consigned--in desperation, I fancied--by his American doctor. Mrs. Smith’s distress was as evident as his own irritation; Miss Fanny alone seemed wholly tranquil. She ignored the apparent gravity of the situation and assured me that her father had at last decided upon a long vacation. She declared that if her father persisted in his intention of sailing for New York three weeks later, she and her mother would accompany him.