ed past everybody else. No question of joy in life here.
If a man lived in Meriden, he lived there to work. If a man worked in
Meriden, he worked for the sake of the dollars that had the power finally
to free him from that environment and introduce him to a period of
enjoyment. Most of the people, especially the German and Polish workmen
and tradesmen, saw in the life they were compelled to lead a temporary,
provisional existence, a condition the bitterness of which was
intensified when return to the home country was cut off by sins committed
in the past or by expulsion and banishment. From psychologic interest,
Frederick had entered into conversation with patients in the waiting-room
and had already learned of sad cases of men having been ejected from
their country and left without a home.

Mrs. Schmidt was a Swiss. She had a broad German head, straight, finely
chiselled nose, and a figure like the figures of the women of Basel that
Holbein painted.

"She is much too good for you," Frederick teased Peter. "She ought to be
the wife of a Duerer, or still better, the wife of the wealthy Ratsherr
Willibald Pirkheimer of Nuremberg. She was born to preside over a
comfortable patrician household, with closets and chests full of linen
and heavy silk and brocade garments. She should go to sleep every night
on a bed three yards high covered with silk spreads. She should have
twice as many hats and fur garments as the town council allows the
wealthy. Instead of that, poor soul, she studied medicine, and you let
her run around to every Tom, Dick, and Harry with her little bag of ill
omen."

As a matter of fact, the ugliness of her surroundings and the
strenuousness of her occupation, which opened up no vista of hope and
usually robbed her of four nights' sleep in a week, had made of Mrs.
Schmidt an embittered person suffering from homesickness. What aggravated
matters was that she was dominated by an obstinate sense of duty and that
dogged insistence on saving characteristic of the Swiss. Since her
parents' letters strengthened her in her notions, she was not to be
shaken in her resolve not to return home until after a certain sum had
been laid aside, and of this there was no immediate prospect. Whenever
Peter, saddened to see his wife withering away from overwork and
nostalgia, proposed that they return to Europe, she would become very
hard, cutting and bitter. But when she had a free hour in which to talk
to Frederick and her