"Well, me for the good old U.S.A. These Alps are all right, I guess--but I can't say I like the coffee."
"And it takes too long to get a letter from Jersey City."
"Yes, that reminds me. Just before I started up here this afternoon my wife got the _Ladies' Home Journal_ of month before last. It had been following us around for six weeks, from London to Paris, to Berlin, to Munich, to Vienna, to a dozen other places. Now she's fixed for the night. She won't let up until she's read every word--the advertisements first. And she'll spend all day to-morrow sending off for things--new collar hooks, breakfast foods, complexion soaps and all that sort of junk. Are you married yourself?"
"Well, then, you don't know how it is. But I guess you play poker."
"Well, let's go down into the town and hunt up some quiet barroom and have a civilised evening. This scenery gives me the creeps."
"I'm with you. But where are we going to get any chips?"
"Don't worry. I carry a set with me. I made my wife put it in the bottom of my trunk, along with a bottle of real whiskey and a couple of porous plasters. A man can't be too careful when he's away from home."
They start along the terrace toward the station of the funicular railway. The sun has now disappeared behind the great barrier of ice and the colours of the scene are fast softening. All the scarlets and vermilions are gone; a luminous pink bathes the whole scene in its fairy light. The night train for Venice, leaving the town, appears as a long string of blinking lights. A chill breeze comes from the Alpine vastness to westward. The deep silence of an Alpine night settles down. The two Americans continue their talk until they are out of hearing. The breeze interrupts and obfuscates their words, but now and then half a sentence comes clearly.
"Have you seen any American papers lately?"
"Nothing but the Paris _Herald_--if you call _that_ a paper."
"... badly as usual ... rotten ... slump ... shake up...."
"... John McGraw ... Connie Mack ... glass arm...."
"... homesick ... give five dollars for...."
"... whole continent without a single baseball cl...."
"... glad to get back ... damn tired...."
The casual Sunday School superintendent, bursting with visions of luxurious gaieties, his brain incited by references to _Wiener blut_, his corpuscles tripping to the strains of some Viennese _schlagermusik_, will suffer only disappointment as he sallies forth on his first night in Vienna. He is gorgeously caparisoned with clean linen, talcumed, exuding Jockey Club, prepared for surgical and psychic shock, his legs drilled hollow to admit of precious fluids, his pockets bulging with kronen. He is a lovely, mellow creature, a virtuoso of the domestic virtues when home, but now, at large in Europe, he craves excitement. His timid soul is bent on participating in the deviltries for which Vienna is famous. His blood is thumping through his arteries in three-four time. His mind is inflamed by such strophes as "_Es giebt nur a Kaiserstadt; es giebt nur a Wien_" and "_Immer luste, fesch und munter, und der Wiener geht nit unter_." But he is brought gradually to the realisation that something is amiss. Can it be that the vice crusaders have been at work? Have the militant moralists and the professional women hunters, in their heated yearnings to flay the transgressor, fallen foul of Vienna?