CHAPTER XIII
BERLIN
Whatever prejudices Tom Graves may have had against Colonel Heinrich Wedekind disappeared during his first twenty-four hours in Berlin and he told himself that either the man must have changed to his advantage during the long years when Martin had not seen him, or that the latter must have been mistaken in his judgment of his brother's character.
For, if anything, Martin had warned Tom against Heinrich in the special delivery letter he had sent care of the steamship office in New York, and here was the Colonel the very image of friendliness and consideration.
True, the man was at times over-polite; with the sort of politeness, different from the spontaneous politeness of the American, which is the result of broad, national kindliness, from the French, which is a racial trait and a virtue bred by logic since it is such an effort to a Latin to be rude, from the English, which is careless and supremely sure of itself, from the Spanish, which is a marvelously delicate art. . . With the sort of politeness which seemed to have been scientifically and efficiently measured, probed, manufactured, chiseled, clouted, and cut into patterns, distributed by order of the Government, drilled, and trained in a mathematical fashion, together with the three R's, A rectangular, a self-conscious, a holier-than-thou politeness!
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