“Marie!” cried Heloise.  “How she will work!  She has the confidence of the Socialist party—­both wings—­wherever she is known; and she can talk—­like a torrent of liquid fire.”

“And the next chapter?” asked Mrs. Prentiss curiously.  “You led the German women in thought for five years.  Shall you have a Woman’s Republic, with you as President?”

“Certainly not.  It is not in the German women—­not yet—­to crave the grinding cares of public life.  We shall make the men do the work, and we will live for the first time.  Delivered from Caesarism and junkerism and with the advanced men of Germany at the head of a Republic, I should feel too secure of Germany’s future to demand any of the ugly duties of government—­although the women will speak through the men.  Their day of silence and submission is forever passed—­”

“Same here,” remarked Mimi, stretching and yawning.  “Let’s go to bed.  I have smoked fifty-three cigarettes and my voice is ruined.  Nevertheless I shall be a great prima donna, and you, Gisela, can chuck propaganda, and write romance.  The world will devour it after these years of undiluted realism written in red ink on a black page.  Look at the sun trying to climb out of that mist and give us his blessing.”

“I shall go for a walk,” said Gisela, “and I shall go alone.”

IV

1

Mrs. Prentiss and Mrs. Tolby placed a large sum of money to Gisela’s account in a Swiss bank, and this she transferred to the Bayerischer Vereinsbank in Munich.  As she had collected large sums for war relief, and was on the board of nine war charities, no suspicion was excited.  She had given to these organizations the greater part of the small fortune she had made from her play and other writings, not absorbed by taxation and bond subscriptions, but there were many wealthy women, hungry, sad, apprehensive that peace would find them paupers, upon whom she could depend to give liberally.

There was to be no printed matter nor correspondence, but an army of lieutenants, who, starting from certain centers, would augment their numbers from Gisela’s long list of correspondents, until it would be possible to sound personally all the women of a district whom it was thought wise to trust.

Gisela returned to Germany as soon as she had worked out the details of her campaign and received the enthusiastic donation of her American friends.  Mimi Brandt, Marie von Erkel (who looked like an ecstatic fury of the French Revolution when she realized that at last she had a role to play in life that would not only vent her consuming energies and ambition, but enable her to assist in the downfall of a race of men whom she hated, both for their tyranny and indifference to brains without beauty, with all the diverted passion of her nature), Aimee von Erkel, who was persistent, incisive, and so alarmed at the prospect of all the men in the world being killed, that she would have