The man had set out that morning from Munich to deliver the horses to a purchaser a hundred miles away in the Bavarian hills. Poor as they were, the animals had been sold for seven thousand marks. A first-class horse was worth six to ten thousand nowadays, he asserted. Times had indeed changed. A few years ago only an insane man would have paid as many hundred. It was a hot day for the middle of May, a quick change from the long, unusual cold spell. The crops would suffer. He didn’t mind walking, if only beer were not so expensive when one got thirsty. Having exhausted his scant mental reservoir with these and a few as commonplace remarks, he fell into the rear conversationally as well as physically, and abandoned the field to his sharp-witted spouse. She, having more than her share of all too solid flesh to carry, had left the afternoon before and passed the night at a wayside inn. It was not that she was fond of such excursions nor that she could not trust her husband away from home. While he was delivering the horses she would go “hamstering,” buying up a ruck-sackful of food among the peasants of that region, if any could be coaxed out of them, and they would return by train. Fortunately, fourth-class was still cheap. Before the war she had never dreamed of going anything but second. I broke my usual rule of the road and mentioned my scribbling proclivities. A moment later we were deeply engrossed in a discussion of German novelists and dramatists. The placid, bourgeois-looking _Frau_ had read everything of importance her literary fellow-countrymen had produced; she was by no means ignorant of the best things in that line in the outside world. Thrown into the crucible of her forceful mentality, the characters of fiction had emerged as far more living beings than the men and women who passed us now and then on the road—immensely more so, it was evident, though she did not say so, than the husband who plodded behind us, frankly admitting by his very attitude that we had entered waters hopelessly beyond his depth. Of all the restrictions the war had brought, none had struck her quite so directly as the decrease in quality and number of the plays at Munich’s municipal theater. Luckily they were now improving. But she always had to go alone. _He_—with a toss of her head to the rear—didn’t care for anything but the movies. He laughed himself sick over those. As to opera, her greatest pleasure in life, he hadn’t the faintest conception of what it was all about. He liked American ragtime (she pronounced it “rhakteam”), however. Still, America had opera also, _nicht wahr_? Had not many of Germany’s best singers gone to my country? There was Slézak, for instance, and Schumann-Heink and Farrar.... I might have questioned her notion of the nationality of some of the names she mentioned, but what did it matter?