Gisela met Franz von Nettelbeck at a court function and had her little revenge.  He was furious, and vowed, quite audibly, that he would never forgive her.  But Gisela was merely disturbed lest the Obersthofmeisterin who stood but three feet away overhear his caustic remarks.  Distinguished professors (without their wives) might go to court as a reward for shedding added luster upon the German Empire, but lesser mortals who had received payment for services rendered might not.  Her independent mother, still a favorite, for she was exceeding discreet, would have incurred the imperial displeasure if the truth were known.  However, the incident passed unnoticed, and Franz, whatever his shortcomings, was a gentleman and kept her secret.

The scene at the palace had been brilliant and sustaining and she had received much personal homage, for she was looking very beautiful and radiant, and the little adventure had been incense to her pride (moreover the young Freifrau von Nettelbeck, whom she saw on his arm later, was an insignificant little hausfrau); but when she was in her room after midnight she realized grimly that if she had not done her work so well during that terrible month in New York and buried her sex heart, she should once more be beating the floor or the wall with her impotent hands.  But the knowledge of her immunity made her a little sad.

3

The next episode to her grim humor was wholly amusing, although it played its part in her developing sense of revolt against the attitude of the German male to the sex of the mother that bore him.  She returned to Munich after a month in Berlin, for by this time she had made up her mind to write, and the city by the Isar was the most beautiful in the world to write and to dream in.  Moreover, she wished to attend the lectures on drama at the University.

The four years in America, during which she had, in spite of her sentimental preoccupation, studied diligently every phase that passed before her keen critical vision, analyzed every person she had met, and passed many of her evenings in the study of the best contemporary fiction, had, associated with the spur of her own upheaval, developed her imagination, and her head was full of unwritten stories.  They were highly realistic, of course, as became a modern German, but unmistakably dramatic.

She attended the lectures, practising on short stories meanwhile, devoting most of her effort to becoming a stylist, that she might attain immediate recognition whatever her matter.  She lived in a small but comfortable hotel, for not only had she saved the greater part of her salary, but the Bolands, however oblivious socially of a paid attendant, had a magnificent way with them at Christmas, and had given her an even larger cheque at parting.