Sabinsport, after any one of the German towns of corresponding size, seemed ugly, unfinished, disorderly. To their trim, solid, spotless exterior was opposed a straggling, temporary, half-cleaned condition in at least the greater part of the town. Instead of a careful business management of town affairs, by men trained as they would have been for bank or factory, was an absurd political system of choosing men for offices. It was not the good of the town that was at issue, although both sides loudly claimed that it alone considered Sabinsport; it was always the party, with the result that clever men, like Mulligan and Cowder, practically controlled affairs. Otto might, six years before, have laughed at this ridiculous method of running a town, but not now. Germany had taught him to be serious--oh, very serious, particularly in public matters. It shamed him that his home, the place where he must live and do business, should conduct itself in this crude and wasteful fashion. He found it difficult in the bank. His "reforms" were disliked--his father, the directors, the men at the books and the windows, clung to their ways, and their ways were not, in his judgment, "scientific." His father laughed at his impatience. "You must go slow, Otto. What people won't willingly do because they see it is the better, cannot succeed. Perhaps we're not so bad as you think. Admit our results are good." But Otto was convinced it was chance, the luck of the American, not any sound practice that had brought the bank where it stood. Then constantly there was an irritation in business, a resentment that they would not see and admit the superiority of the practices he would introduce. The social life bored him, or rather the lack of it. There was no provision for daily natural mixing with one's friends--no coffee hour, no beer garden, no music. He resented the indifference to the friendly side of life. He criticized resentfully the habit of regarding pleasure as something to be bought with money--the inability to get it without spending. Indeed, Otto felt a thorough and rather bitter disgust at the place money held in Sabinsport. She regarded it, he felt, as an end. Getting it was the chief thing with which men's minds were occupied. They seemed never to think of public affairs except in terms of business, and of very personal business, too.