“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

I do not know what another person would have done, but at this point I gave up; that cast-iron indifference, that tranquil contemptuousness, conquered me, and I struck my colors.  Now I knew she was used to receiving about a penny from manly people who care nothing about the opinions of scullery-maids, and about tuppence from moral cowards; but I laid a silver twenty-five cent piece within her reach and tried to shrivel her up with this sarcastic speech: 

“If it isn’t enough, will you stoop sufficiently from your official dignity to say so?”

She did not shrivel.  Without deigning to look at me at all, she languidly lifted the coin and bit it!—­to see if it was good.  Then she turned her back and placidly waddled to her former roost again, tossing the money into an open till as she went along.  She was victor to the last, you see.

I have enlarged upon the ways of this girl because they are typical; her manners are the manners of a goodly number of the Baden-Baden shopkeepers.  The shopkeeper there swindles you if he can, and insults you whether he succeeds in swindling you or not.  The keepers of baths also take great and patient pains to insult you.  The frowsy woman who sat at the desk in the lobby of the great Friederichsbad and sold bath tickets, not only insulted me twice every day, with rigid fidelity to her great trust, but she took trouble enough to cheat me out of a shilling, one day, to have fairly entitled her to ten.  Baden-Baden’s splendid gamblers are gone, only her microscopic knaves remain.

An English gentleman who had been living there several years, said: 

“If you could disguise your nationality, you would not find any insolence here.  These shopkeepers detest the English and despise the Americans; they are rude to both, more especially to ladies of your nationality and mine.  If these go shopping without a gentleman or a man-servant, they are tolerably sure to be subjected to petty insolences —­insolences of manner and tone, rather than word, though words that are hard to bear are not always wanting.  I know of an instance where a shopkeeper tossed a coin back to an American lady with the remark, snappishly uttered, ‘We don’t take French money here.’  And I know of a case where an English lady said to one of these shopkeepers, ‘Don’t you think you ask too much for this article?’ and he replied with the question, ’Do you think you are obliged to buy it?’ However, these people are not impolite to Russians or Germans.  And as to rank, they worship that, for they have long been used to generals and nobles.  If you wish to see what abysses servility can descend, present yourself before a Baden-Baden shopkeeper in the character of a Russian prince.”