He came of an excellent Berlin family, but his father, dead these many years, had been of such a grimly Calvinistic turn of mind that he had not been able to understand why his own children should have been born with a grain of original sin. To the father, the whole of life had meant nothing but a continuous and emphatic moral action. He had brought up his two sons accordingly, and had strained their souls to such a horrible pitch of self-righteousness and hard idealism that they threatened to snap and recoil,
And finally, in the case of Martin, his younger son, it had recoiled. He had been guilty of a small sin and had been shipped off to America thirty years earlier.
He had come straight West, had done well there, and had become an American heart, soul, and politics, including even the saving prejudices. He hated the very sound of the word hyphen.
"There are two classes of hyphenates," he used to say when he warmed to the subject. "There's the sort who get here via the steerage with the clothes they stand in, make their stake, thanks to the splendid hospitality, the fairness of equal chance, and the unlimited possibilities of America, and return to Germany as first-class passengers with money jingling in their jeans. Over yonder they pose as Simon-pure Yankees and read the New York Herald, while here in America they swear by Bill the Kaiser and read the New Yorker Herold. They are the breed who hate America and dislike Germany, who try to straddle the fence, who would kick at the climate of both Hell and Paradise, who are neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Then there’s the other variety, the intellectual hyphenates—and often they have good American names and not a drop of German blood in their
