"Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?"

I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the
aborigines. It used to fuss me to death to meet one of
them in the halls. They always stopped short, brought
heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist,
and thundered: "Nabben', Fraulein!"

I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly,
and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed
aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply,
"Nabben'," and wish that Norah could but see me in the
act.

When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed
a little and shrugged his shoulders and said:

"Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and
so unmarried. In Germany a married woman brushes her
hair quite smoothly back, and pins it in a hard knob.
And she knows nothing of such bewildering collars and
fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do
you call them--jabots?"

Von Gerhard has not behaved at all nicely. I did not
see him until two weeks after my arrival in Milwaukee,
although he telephoned twice to ask if there was anything
that he could do to make me comfortable.

"Yes," I had answered the last time that I heard his