Gisela, like many women of dominating intellect and personality, had exhausted her power of sex-love with her first unfortunate but prolonged passion, and although she had no hatred of men, and indeed liked many and craved their society, she gave her real sympathies and affections to her women friends.  She had no intimates, and this, perhaps, was one secret of her power.  A certain aloofness is essential in intellectual leadership.  But if she had no talent for intimacy she had much for friendship, and the friends of her inner circle were all women, partly because there was no waste of time fending off love-making, partly because there were more interests in common, consequently a deeper bond.  To-night she was filled with an irresistible pity and a longing to set them free.  But her hands were tied.  She dared not even go to Great Headquarters and protest against the terrible fate of the young girls of Lille.  She would have accomplished no good and become an instant object of suspicion.

3

For many months she did her duty doggedly, her indignation routed by the disquieting fact that the Germans were retreating from the Somme; inch by inch, but still retreating.  Once she might have been satisfied with grandiose phrases and scornful assurances.  But the long attack on Verdun had ended in dark humiliation; a failure that the most resourceful vocabulary was unable to translate into a German advantage, optically inverted.

More than half a million young Germans had fallen before Verdun, and for what?  That France, disdained these many years by the mighty Teutonic Empire, and numerically inferior, might demonstrate to the world that she was the greater military nation of the two.

What was it all for?  What of the ever-receding fields of peace, grown green and fat again?  What of the racing past dotted with the broken headstones of promises of victory by this means or that?

But to attempt to answer historical enigmas while working day and night over the mangled victims of the Somme was beyond her powers.  It was not until she broke down, and, with Heloise von Erkel and Mimi Brandt, obtained leave to spend a month at St. Moritz, that she found her answer.

III

1

The three girls went to a little hotel that had been a favorite resort of Gisela’s in times of peace when she had felt an imperative need of the high solitudes and eternal snows.  They planned a week’s rest, and a fortnight or more of mountain climbing, dismissing the world war from their minds as far as possible.  But their gentle plans were upset on the eighth day after their arrival, when at the end of an hour’s hard skating, clad in the bright sweaters and caps of old, Gisela suddenly stopped short and returned the hard stare of two young women who had drawn apart and were evidently discussing her.  That they were Americans Gisela recognized at a glance, but for a moment she saw them through