He was more confounded by the attitude of the women. They were even fiercer than the men. To them the other Europeans were a wholly bad lot. Those neighbors were so much in the way of the good, all-worthy Germans. But it was on the English that this feminine hatred vented itself most turbulently. Frau Bucher shouted that she would be more than glad--she would be hilarious--if war came. "I would wear my last rag for years, see my two boys dead on the battle front, if Gross Britain could be knocked into the bottom of the sea." Was all this a part of that national gladness Gard was observing in Germany and could not gage, could not yet give an explicit and sufficient reason for? Those old-time Teuton liberals, masters of prose and verse--how would they feel at home in this modern Rhineland of hysterical spleen and arms provocative? Was it possible he had really come on a sort of fool's errand? CHAPTER VII GERMAN LOVING Fraeulein Elsa was a blooming, almost blue-eyed young woman of twenty. Such a fresh, strawberry and cream complexion under a plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America with anyone very serious. _There_ she would have been thought arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness daily worked growing wonders in Kirtley. It is a luckless young traveler who does not find himself or herself engaged in some romance, permanent or transient, which ever after sweetens or gilds the memories of the tour. Moreover Gard was at an age when youthful susceptibilities were softened by the lackadaisicalness of his returning state of health and hope. So his difficulties with the German language, feasting, sleeping and redoubtable ways in general, were to be complicated by German loving. The shining object of his tenderness--how she was to lend brightness to the short dismal days and long black nights of the Teuton winter! At first he had asked himself: "Is a campaign of the heart in Deutschland as portentous, dreadfully systematic, a proceeding as the other undertakings? Do the Germans go at that sort of thing, too, hammer and tongs?" The glowing Fraeulein was able-bodied, full-chested, with every golden promise of a rich maternityhood. Did American girls have any bosoms to speak of? Gard seemed now to have never noticed that feature in them. Yet bounding breasts are the unashamed pride of German girls.