Perhaps the rebellion of the Niebuhr girls would never have crystallized (for, after all, their everyday experience was much like that of other girls of their class, merely intensified by their father’s persistence of executive ardors) had it not been for two subtle influences, quite unsuspected by the haughty Kammerherr:  they had an American friend, Kate Terriss, who was “finishing her voice” in Berlin, and their married sister, Mariette, had recently spent a fortnight in the paternal nest.

The count despised the entire American race, as all good Prussians did, but he was as wax to feminine blandishments outside of his family, and Miss Terriss was pretty, diplomatic, alluring, and far cleverer than he would have admitted any woman could be.  She wound the old martinet round her finger, subdued her rampant Americanism in his society, and amused herself sowing the seeds of rebellion in the minds of “those poor Niebuhr girls.”  As the countess also liked her, she had been “in and out of the house” for nearly a year.  The young Prussians had alternately gasped and wept at the amazing stories of the liberty, the petting, the procession of “good times” enjoyed by American girls of their own class, to say nothing of the invariable prerogative of these fortunate girls to choose their own husbands; who, according to the unprincipled Miss Terriss, invariably spoiled their wives, and permitted them to go and come, to spend their large personal allowances, as they listed.  Gisela closed her beloved volume of Grimm’s fairy tales and never opened it again.

But it was the visit of Mariette that had marshalled vague dissatisfactions to an ordered climax.  She had left her husband in the garrison town she had married with the excellent young officer, making a trifling indisposition of her mother a pretext for escape.  On the night before her departure the four girls huddled in her bed after the opera and listened to an incisive account of her brief but distasteful period of matrimony.  Not that she suffered from tyranny.  Quite the reverse.  Of her several suitors she had cannily engineered into her father’s favor a young man of pleasing appearance, good title and fortune, but quite without character behind his fierce upstanding mustache.  Inheriting her father’s rigid will, she had kept the young officer in a state of abject submission.  She stroked his hair in public as if he had been her pet dachshund, and patted his hand at kindly intervals as had he been her dear little son.

“But Karl has the soul of a sheep,” she informed the breathless trio.  “You might not be so fortunate.  Far, far from it.  How can any one more than guess before one is fairly married and done for?  Look at papa.  Does he not pass in society as quite a charming person?  The women like him, and if poor mama died he could get another quick as a wink.  But at the best, my dear girls, matrimony—­in Germany, at least—­is an unmitigated bore.  And in a garrison town!