sires must not be limited or
weakened by pale Puritanisms. That men are normally uncleansed
sewers from which the face need not be averted, was a conception
Kirtley's senses had fallen somewhat foul of in the Bucher home. To
what point this aspect was carried logically outside Villa Elsa, he
was to realize in skirting the openly sensual sides.

The two Germans told of the various girls who had lived with them
when in college. For the frank amatory life of the Teuton student
begins early. Von Tielitz and Messer also boasted of their
present-day mistresses who were so often changed for reasons of
economy. The hilarious game, as Gard learned, was to obtain favors
in exchange for nothing as far as possible. Trickery, lies, abuse,
kicks, were employed to this purpose. Female chastity? A fable for
the impotent. Consequently all was fair.

Sisters of their respected fellows were inferentially appraised and
colloquially "hefted" as articles of social commerce ready to be
knocked off matrimonially to the best bidder under the material
rules of the German _Mitgift_ system. Through the garish films of
innuendo and braggadocio that day Kirtley was led to behold images
of these daughters as if they were languishing to become mates and
beating their breasts in their longing to become mothers. He had by
no means now forgotten Friedrich's equivocal remarks about Elsa.

Before Gard was to leave Deutschland he had to conclude that the
German puts himself in the attitude of thinking of his women as
sluttish and accordingly acting in that scale toward them. There
is no great gilding to these fancies. Girls are small inspiration
to him compared with what the _petites dames_ are to the amorous
Frenchman. Idealization of love in its ultimate fulfillment, the
poetizing of the ardent flesh crying out for its craving mate,
are characteristically ignored by the Teuton who seeks the baser
gratifications without illuminations of loveliness or hesitations
of delicate refinement.

Kirtley thought he knew young men, yet this revolting capacity in
them in Germany was proven to him to be not unnormal by its openness
and by the dearth of any loud voices in rebuke. The German is
conspicuously full of animal spirits. He affects the mighty in
physique. Exudations and emanations are frank and prominent
functions.

Under the Kaiser the Berlin dame who rented rooms to the foreign
student, offering them "with" or "without," meaning sometimes her
own dau