tears, and threats of abrupt demise, to obtain permission to move her piano—­a present from relatives who occasionally came to the rescue—­a bookcase and three chairs up to the garret and have a room she could call her own.  Frau von Erkel was scandalized that a French girl (she systematically ignored the German infusion in her daughters) should wish for hours of solitude.  But Aimee had the national genius for pegging away, and her mother, who came in time to feel that one nerve was being gnawed with maddening reiteration, finally succumbed; relieving her mind daily.

After that it was comparatively easy, although there were several notable engagements, for Heloise to become secretary to Gisela Doering.  She never dared admit that she received a generous monthly cheque for her services, but Gisela was a favorite with the old lady (always sitting placidly in her chair, with her hands in her lap, a faint ironic smile on her still pretty face), and as her literary style was extolled by her exacting daughters (Frau von Erkel never read even a German newspaper, but subscribed for Le Figaro), and as she knew Gisela to be a member of her own class, the new connection was harmonious; and Heloise at last experienced something like real liberty in the tiny garden house of the parterre apartment of Gisela Doering on the Koeniginstrasse.

2

There is little time in the war zones to meet and talk, but even nurses must rest and take the air, and during the month before the frightful rush of wounded after the British offensive on the Somme began, the four girls, all in different hospitals, maneuvered to obtain leave of absence at the same hour, early in the evening.  They promenaded the desolate streets arm in arm, their heads together, relieving their burdened souls.  There was no idea of treason in any one of those rebellious minds, for they still believed their Fatherland to have been on the defensive from the first, the victim of a conspiracy, and they knew from the expression of the officers’ faces, to say nothing of their tempers, that the danger was by no means past.

But being women, and women who had thought for themselves for many years, they must talk it out, and when too overcharged to trust their comments to the narrow streets, they retired to a hillock outside the city which no spy could approach unseen.  However, nothing was farther from the minds of the German men of war than that the women cogs of their supremely organized land should presume to criticize methods which had, to their best belief, terrorized the world.

“But we are not the only ones,” said Heloise grimly, as they sat on their refuge one dusky evening.  “All but the sheep have a word to say now and then.  Of course there always will be women who will grovel at the feet of men merely because they are men; but look out for the others when this accursed war is over.  God!  How I hate men!  To think that once I dreamed and hoped like the silly