en so fond of, without having time to salute
any of his many friends good-by. He had to send them a line of
farewell from St. Petersburg.

"Here you have German bureaucracy in its full flower and odor,"
remarked Anderson as he recounted the affair to Kirtley. "It
flourishes to a great extent by exaggerating mole hills into
mountains with officious vacuity. It is so large that there is not
enough serious work for it. So something often must be found to do.
It is a civil army radiating the glory of the Kaiser. The more
extensive it is, the more entrenched he is. It is official dry rot
which is part of the price the people pay for having themselves
governed. It is national graft. But while our American forms of
graft at least stimulate individual cleverness among our
compatriots, this German form tends to reduce its recipients to the
level of donkeys, as seen in the Deming case."

Gard little suspected that he was to drift into a somewhat similar
misadventure, but of an advanced type.

CHAPTER XXIX

WINTER AND SPRING

The sudden drop in the life in Villa Elsa occasioned by meteoric Jim
Deming's disappearance, was terrific. Frau Bucher gasped, caught her
breath and sank voluminously beneath the waters of social oblivion
whence she had so grandly emerged. When she finally came up to her
plain surface of existence she demanded, Where are now the theater
parties, and drives in the Grosse Garten behind the King? The family
had almost begun to wonder how they had got on before. She wailed:

"The good Herr Deming, the marvelous Herr Deming! How could he have
abruptly left us? Something mightily strange must have forced him to
go. He will surely return. How could he treat Elsa so? Here we are
with our hopes, our plans and our new underwear. It is terrible."

For several days the house resounded with perturbation. This
gradually decreased as the readjustment to the former flat
conditions took place. The transition was not completed until the
information arrived that Herr Deming was never coming back. The
final stroke. It was indeed pitiable, tragic, amusing. And all
because the American custom of flirtation was unknown to these
matter-of-fact Germans, so deadly in earnest about everything.

But, Teuton-like, the brave ship Villa Elsa soon righted itself,
being used to blows. It had at least entertained and been
entertained by one of the Golden Youths of Good Fortune whose
legends gild the expectations of every ra