Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys clicked off the closing words: 

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.”

He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary.  His head ached hotly.  With elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands.  All the agony, the bitterness, the burden of preceding days swept over him, but behind it was a cool and cleansing current of peace. “Ich kann nicht anders,” he whispered.

Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly: 

“God helping her, she can do no other.”

THE HEAD OF THE FIRM

He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in.  Sitting in his private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where bright red and yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily through the papers and magazines.  He was familiar with several foreign languages, and would skim through the text.  Then he would pound the table with his fist, walk angrily about the floor, and tear the offensive journals into strips.  For very often he found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons that were most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of his firm.

His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, but he was plucky in his own harsh way.  He insisted on seeing them.  Always the same thing happened.  His face would grow grim, the seam-worn forehead would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb nervously.  His gray eyes would flash—­and the fist come down heavily on the mahogany desk.

When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is not well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage.  But he had always found it hard to control his temper.  He sometimes remembered what a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, forty-five years before:  “He who loses his temper will lose everything.”

But he must be granted great provocation.  He had always had difficulties to contend with.  His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny in childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left arm when he was an infant; but in spite of these handicaps he had made himself a vigorous swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better with one arm than most sportsmen with two.  After leaving the university he served in the army, but at his father’s death the management of the vast family business came into his hands.  He was then twenty-eight.