American woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their
regular terms until poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then
at last toward evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the
corner of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing,
and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for
earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.

A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the
center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear
higher than the other and twisted one's nose. But there was an odor
of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many
previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco.
Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather faint.

She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity
of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or
twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her
eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a
cheese and some tinned fish under his arm.

He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.

"Not ill, are you?" he asked in English, and then remembering. "Bist du
krank?" He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity
of the "du."

Harmony smiled faintly.

"Only tired," she said in English. "And the odor of cabbage--".

Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand.
He whistled softly. He had recognized her.

"Cabbage, of course!" he said. "The pension upstairs is full of it.
I live there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served up with
pork."

"I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?"

He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.

"So bad," he observed, "that I keep body and soul together by buying
strong and odorous food at the delicatessens--odorous, because only
rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only
thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese
has retired defeated."

"But I don't like cheese." In sheer relief from the loneliness of the
day her spirits were rising.

"Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I
say--" He hesitated.

"Yes?"

"Would you--don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?"

"It sounds attractive,"--uncertainly.

"Coffee with whipped cre