“I for my part,” said Frederick, smiling, “have stipulated an armistice for the next few years.  I want for once to try to get on with what the world is able to offer.  I want to disaccustom myself as much as possible from reflection and dreams.”

Frederick felt it was his duty to persuade his friend, both for his own and for his wife’s sake, to return to Europe.

“Peter,” he said, “the Americans have no use for a man like you.  You cannot recommend patent medicines, nor can you by administering small doses keep a man chained to his bed for two months when you can cure him with quinine in a week.  You have none of those characteristics which in the eyes of the average American make an aristocrat.  From the American point of view you are a simpleton, because you are always ready to sacrifice yourself for every poor dog that strays your way.  You ought to return to a land where, thank the Lord, the aristocracy of the spirit, the aristocracy of ideas is still a match for that other aristocracy.  You ought to return to a land that would consider itself defunct and buried were the men of science and art no longer to represent the flower of its inhabitants.  There are enough Germans here without you who are breaking their necks to forget the language of Goethe, the language their mothers taught them.  Save your wife.  Save yourself.  Go back to Germany, go to Switzerland, go to France, go to England, go anywhere you will, but don’t remain in this tremendous industrial corporation, where art, science, and true culture are, at present at least, wholly out of place.”

But Peter Schmidt wavered.  He loved America.  And if, Indian fashion, he laid his ear to the ground, he already heard the festive music being rehearsed below ground that is to be played on the great day of a universal renaissance.

“All of us,” he said, “should first be Americanized and then become neo-Europeans.”

One of Frederick’s favourite walks was to the suburb of Meriden where the Italian wine-growers settled.  You could hear the men singing with their voices warm as the sunlight, the women calling the children with that cry of theirs pitched in octaves.  You saw brown men binding the vines, and on Sundays you heard them talking and laughing, while the boccia balls rolled with dull thuds over the well-trodden soil in the open fields where they played.  Those voices and sounds were piercingly sweet and familiar to Frederick.

“You may kill me for saying so, but I am, and will remain, a European.”

His homesickness grew stronger and stronger.  He went about singing such passionate praises of Europe to his friends that he entangled them in the web of his feelings, and finally melted away even Mrs. Schmidt’s rigid resistance.

A surprising change came over her.  She forgot her exhaustion, she moved briskly, she laughed again, and began to make all sorts of plans for a future in Europe.