It was the Hohenzollerns and defeat, or a Republic and easy terms from the victors who would welcome a sound de-brutalized Germany, jealous of her lost honor, into the family of nations.  The arguments were brief and simple.  Gisela would have won over women far less despairing than these.  And the fact that she had spent four years in America studying its institutions and resources, convinced the most susceptible to official lies that the United States could pour money, men, ammunition, munitions and food into Europe for countless years; and that the agitations of her pacifists, syndicalists, German agents, and bribe-takers were but picturesque ripples on the surface of a nation covering over three million five hundred thousand square miles and embracing more than one hundred million people.

And with all the insidious subtlety of her supple mind she changed the prevailing hatred of President Wilson into a profound and pathetic confidence.  She had long since made them envy and admire the women of America, and if these fortunate beings had enthusiastically reelected him and were now giving his policy as persistent and effective assistance as the men, it was for the desperate women of Germany to believe in his promises of deliverance.  Above all he had now the approval of their own Gisela Doering.

It was the mothers of Germany, balked, potential, or veritable, who were ready to rise and rescue what was left of the youth of Germany.  If victory for the German arms were hopeless they would risk their own lives to force a peace that would leave them with the rags of their old honor and prosperity, that would give them revenge upon the men who had, for their own criminal ambitions—­ambitions which belonged to the Middle Ages—­doomed them to lifelong sorrow; and that would save the lives of their children—­save husbands also for a few of these stern and weary girls.  Even in the Rhine Valley, where the greater number of the munition and ammunition factories were grouped, there were incessant meetings, among the night and day shifts, of the thousands of women employed there, and Gisela herself addressed each of them.

V

1

Gisela, who had been staring across the Koeniginstrasse into the heavy branches that hung over the wall of the park, her mental vision too actively raking the past to spare a beam for the familiar picture, suddenly switched her searchlight away from those milestones in her historic progress and concentrated it upon a suspicious shadow opposite.  Surely it had moved, and there was not a breath of wind.  The night was mild and still.

She did not move a muscle but narrowed her gaze until it detached the figure of a man from the dark background of wall and trees.  Always apprehensive of spies, although the Gott commandeered by the Kaiser seemed to have adjusted blinders to eyes strained west, east, and south, she leapt to the conclusion that she was under surveillance at last, and her heart beat thickly.  She who had believed that the long strain, the constant danger, the incessant demand for resource and ever more resource, had transformed her nerves to pure steel, realized angrily that on this last night when she had permitted herself an hour’s idle retrospect before commanding sleep, her nerves more nearly resembled the strings of a violin.