“Countess Niebuhr.  I have practised a little innocent deception here in Munich—­for obvious reasons.  Also, during my four years’ sojourn in America—­”

“In America?” His brain, a fine, concentrated, Teutonic organ, strove to grapple with two ideas at once.  “You have been in America!”

“Rather.  I feel half an American.  You have no idea how it changed my point of view—­oh, but in many ways!  The men, you see, are so different from ours.  The American woman has a magnificent position—­”

“Ridiculous, uppish, spoilt creatures—­”

“But how delicious to be spoiled.  You will call on my mother?”

Zottmyer almost choked.  “I hate the Prussians—­above all, that arrogant junker class.  And the name of Niebuhr!—­why, it stands for all that junkerdom means in its most virulent form!”

“I am afraid it does.  My brothers are junkers unalloyed.  But I can assure you that my mother is as democratic as one may be in Berlin.  She has quite a number of friends among the intellectuals—­”

“Would she consent to your marriage with a—­a—­mere intellectual?”

“What has that to do with it!  It would never occur to me to marry out of my own class.  That is always a mistake.  There are, you see,—­well—­subtle differences that forbid harmony—­”

“You are a snob.  I might have seen it before this.  You give yourself airs—­” He was now so torn between fury and disappointment, mortification and Teutonic resentment at being obliged to diverge abruptly from precisely thought-out tactics, that he forgot his physical discomfort—­and incidentally to use his handkerchief.

“A snob?  When I am true to the best traditions of my race?  Did you not tell me that you would not marry a Venus if she happened to be born outside of your own class?  But it is rather cold here—­not?  Shall I send the note of introduction to your flat?”

“I would not put my foot in any supercilious junker palace, and I never wish to see you again!” He whirled about, burying his nose in his handkerchief, and tore down the street.

Gisela laughed, but with little amusement.  Her sympathy for German women took a long stride.  But she forgot him a few moments later at her desk.

4

During the next five years she wrote many short stories and essays, and four plays.  Her work appealed subtly but clearly to the growing rebellion of the German women; she was too much of an artist to write frank propaganda and the critics were long waking up to the object of her work.  Her first three plays were failures, but the fourth ran for two years and a half and was played all over Germany and Austria.  It was a brilliant, dramatic, half-humorous, half-tragic exposition of the German woman’s enforced subservience to man as compared with the glorious liberty of the somewhat exaggerated American co-heroine.