And Hillyard was always upon his guard against the intrusion of a contempt for the German effort.

That contempt was easy enough for a man who, having read year after year of the wonders of the loud-vaunted German system of espionage, had come fresh from his reading into contact with the actual agents.

Their habit of lining their pockets at the expense of their Government, their unfulfilled pretensions, their vanity and extravagance, and, above all, their unimaginative stupidity in their estimation of men--these things were apt in the early years of the war to bewilder the man who had been so often told to fall down before the great idol of German efficiency.
"The German agent works on the assumption that the mind of every foreigner reasons on German lines, but with inferior intelligence.

But behind the agent is the cunning of Berlin, with its long-deliberated plans and its concocted ingenuity of method.

And though on the whole they are countered, as with amazement they admit, by the amateurs from England, still every now and then--not very often--they do bring something off." Thus Hillyard reasoned as he turned the corner of the Plaza Cataluna into the wide Rambla.