I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for
this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her
train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental
sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the
awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed
with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences
on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood
uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She
had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered,
whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopædia, or the history of a
war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the
literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to
see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his
verb in his mouth.