“Perhaps nothing,” said Mimi.  “They made up their minds to do it and they did it.  It is as plain as daylight.  I’d forgive them, too, if they’d won in six months, as they were so sure they would.  What I don’t forgive them for is that they have proved themselves the most criminal fools unhung.  I’m glad that I am a Bavarian, and that Prussia, whom we have always so hated and despised that we have never turned the lions about on the Siegesthor, should be the prime offenders, humiliating as it may be that we fell for their lies and got into this rotten mess.  But go ahead, Mrs. Prentiss.  What’s your next?  Gee, but you can hand it out.  You must have kept tab since August 1st, 1914.”

“I took merely an intelligent American woman’s interest,” said Mrs. Prentiss, momentarily haughty.  “And I spent the first two years and a half in Washington, where I often knew more than the newspapers; at all events where I was constantly in the society of thinking men.  Also honest men, for war was the last thing we wanted, until our honor became too deeply involved to permit us to hold aloof and fatten on your misery any longer.  Also, to be frank, our interests.”

The fact which impressed the Germans and reduced all that had gone before to a heated academic discussion, was that Germany was beaten, and that the United States embargo would reduce the Central Empires to actual starvation, not merely devitalizing subnourishment; combined with their own certainty that the Teutonic Powers would go on fighting, under the lash of Prussia, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of loyal German and Austrian boys, plunge countless more families into hopeless grief, doom all the children in the land to sheer hunger and tuberculosis.

Starvation!  That was the inevitable fate of Germany if she prolonged the war.  And for what?  Prostration, physical, financial, economic.  To suffer for a generation, at least, the fate of the outlaw, mangy dogs nosing among rotten bones, kicked by the victors whenever they stood on their hind legs and whined for mercy.

And the Americans were prepared to pour into France and Britain billions of dollars and millions of men and incalculable tons of food and ammunition.

4

The two Americans had a deeper purpose in forcing this long argument than hammering the truth into those intelligent but Prussianized brains.  As the hours wore toward the dawn they observed with satisfaction that Gisela’s face grew whiter and grimmer, until finally it set itself in rigid lines.  Her mouth was hard, her eyes expanded as if they saw far beyond the crystal mountains glittering before the open windows.  Her mass of dark hair had fallen, and Mrs. Tolby whispered to Mrs. Prentiss that she looked like the Medusa in the Glyptothek in Munich, lovely but relentless.