oreseen and
at a time most unforeseen? And doesn't it seem as if the life we lived
eight years ago, which was so choke-full of actuality, of real living,
had all of a sudden turned to nothing?"

Peter Schmidt proposed, since they were both peripatetic philosophers, to
take a walk through the streets of New York. Frederick went to consult
Ingigerd. He found that for the next few hours she would be completely
taken up with dressmakers. All she said was that she hoped to see him
again at luncheon. Soon after, the two friends were walking along the
asphalt paths of Central Park, swept clean of snow, under the bare, snowy
trees between snowy lawns, while the mad city around them filled the air
with a hundred-tongued Dionysiac uproar.

Though there had been an interruption of eight years in their
intercourse, they took up the threads of conversation as if they had
parted only half an hour before. Within a short time, each had told the
other the most important facts of their lives during those eight years.
Frederick for his account of himself had to go back to the date of his
marriage, the notice of which he had sent to Peter Schmidt. Without
departing from the truth, he related his story with a certain
fancifulness, and though stating facts, mingled in psychological effects
and spiritual crises. He did not refrain from telling how he had been
uprooted and torn this way and that. The first and final achievement of
his former life, he said, was that he had acquired the will to
resignation, though the tone of his voice, as a result of his morning's
experience and his meeting with his best friend, was fresh and vigorous,
by no means tinged with the drab of resignation.

Peter Schmidt's account of himself, in contrast, was very brief. All he
had to report was that his marriage had remained childless and his wife,
a physician, overwhelmed with a sort of midwife practice, had to fight
against the climate and was sick with longing for her father and mother
and her Swiss mountains.

Nostalgia, Frederick suggested, was probably the universal ill from which
all Germans in America suffered. The Friesian refused to admit it, and
Frederick observed in unchanged form that characteristic in his friend
which made of him at once the well-informed practical man of affairs and
the undismayed ideologist. As ideologist, he hoped for the best for
humanity's future in America, for that reason refusing to admit that a
large number of the inhabita