Gard's two young friends did not refrain from talk in the key of indecency. Their complacent revelation of the extent to which the pornographic enters into the German scene, suggested an unclosed Priapean volume whose companion in America is as a sealed book. Kirtley heard that stores filled with obscene objects publicly for sale were to be found on frequented thoroughfares in German cities.
He saw that Frau Bucher's insistence on a chaperone, which he had regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise. Germany was a poor place for an unguarded German girl.
"Great Guns! What a country for me to study for the ministry, study morality, best fit myself for life, as advised by Rebner and, it seems--everybody!"
The German, in all this physical aspect, is not a little like an unabashed ape. Accordingly the foreigner in Deutschland is impressed by the popular worship of the wide-hipped female. The Teuton can leave little to be inferred but that he is more interested in the magnet of her developed hips than in the magic of her brain.
American women, with their slender waists and chaste frigidness born of Plymouth Rock, with their rulership in the home, their influence permeating conspicuously in matters of public interest out of the home, their entire freedom to be courted and married or let alone in unbounded respect--how long would these conditions have been permitted by the Gothic Kaiser if heedless America had fallen into his gradually tightening grip? Doubtless to his view Yankee women were treated too much like dolls. They are not breeders of soldiers, makers of kingdoms. They do not rear children for the State. What have they desirably in common with the disciplined Hausfrau who becomes the mother of the ruling future generations? _She_ is properly the chattel of the Government.
And so it is not enough, as Gard recognized, for Frau or Fräulein to be massive of line and fond of being upholstered in dense colors in order to satisfy the general grossness of her male. It is not enough that she should be armed with strong hands, planted on large feet, and decorated in the German's favorite rococo manner of abounding breasts, to gratify his cyclopean aspirations.