Achmed Abdullah

“ Wedekind lay on the couch in her little boudoir furnished in a style different from the usual neo-German affair, crowded with ornaments that were no decorations, and with decorations that were no ornaments, with bulbous or angular monstrosities in wood or metal that were the fruit of some diseased artist brain from Berlin or Munich. The little octagonal, balconied room spoke of a former generation, both more gentle and more sophisticated. ”

“ She sat up on her couch, her fine old eyes sparkling with intelligence and with a motherly sympathy for the young horse wrangler.
"Mr. Graves," she said, "you are an honest man, a simple man, a clean man. All considered virtues in your native West, I have no doubt, and virtues once in this Germany of mine. But to-day honesty and simplicity are at a discount in Berlin. They are considered morganatic virtues, virtues on the left hand, to be sneered at, to be meanly pitied, purposely misunderstood. ”

“ A simple man, a man of fine, square, old-fashioned ideals—ein echter Ehrenmann, as we say, rather, used to say in Germany—has no business here!"
And she dismissed Tom, who for the first time in his life, knowing neither why he did it nor how, bent over a woman's hand and raised it respectfully to his lips. ”