In Munich she was once more Gisela Doering, once more led the student life.  There are liberties even for people of rank in Munich, and many nobles, exasperated with the rigid class lines of Berlin and other German capitals, move there, and, while careful to attend court functions, make intelligent friends in all sets.  They are, or were, the happiest people in Germany.  Here Gisela could sit alone in a cafe by the hour reading the illustrated papers and smoking with her coffee, attracting no attention whatever.  She joined parties of students during the summer and tramped the Bavarian Alps, and she danced all night at student balls.  Nevertheless, she managed to hold herself somewhat aloof and it was understood that she did not live the “loose” life of the “artist class.”  She was much admired for her stately beauty and her style, and if the young people of that free and easy community were at times inclined to resent a manifest difference, they succumbed to her magnetism, and respected her obvious devotion to a high literary ideal.

It was during her second winter that she met Georg Zottmyer.

He was a tall, narrow, angular young man with a small clipped head and preeminent ears.  His narrow face was set with narrower features, and his eyes were very bright, and the windows of his conceit.  Although his income was minute he boasted a father of note in the University of Leipzig, and his mother had traveled and written a scathing satire on the United States of America.  He had not a grain of originality or imagination, but he too was taking the course in dramatic art, and reading for that degree without whose magic letters he could not hope to take his place in the world of art to which his parts entitled him.  He met Gisela in the lecture room and immediately became her cavalier.

At first Gisela endeavored to get rid of him by an icy front, but this he took for feminine coquetry and his own front was serene.  As he had made up his mind to be a dramatist merely because the career appealed acutely to his itching ambition, so did he in due course make up his mind to marry this handsome brunette (what hair he had was drab) who bore all the earmarks of secret wealth in spite of the fact that she lived in a small hotel.  As time went on, Gisela resigned herself and put his little ego under her microscope.

His wooing was methodical.  He not only walked home with her after every lecture, but he gave her a series of teas in his high little flat, and he really did know “people.”  His parental introductions had given him the entree to the professional circles, and he cultivated society both semi-fashionable and ultra-literary.  He knew no one who had not “arrived.”