But she suspected, during her thirties, that she was, after all, the daughter of a brilliant father as well as of an obsequious mother, and that she had possibilities of mind and spirit that clamored for development and fired the imagination, while utterly without hope.  In other words she was, like many another German woman, in her secret heart, an individual.  But she was not a rebel; her social code forbade that.  She manufactured interests for herself as rapidly, and as various, as possible, preserved her good looks in spite of her eight children (the two that followed Gisela died in infancy), dressed far better than most German women, cultivated society, gave four notable musicales a season, and was devoted to her sons and daughters, although she never opposed her husband’s stern military discipline of those seemingly typical maedchens.  It was her policy to keep the martinet in a good humor, and after all—­she had condemned herself not to think—­what better destiny than to be a German woman of the higher aristocracy?  They might have been born into the middle class, where there were quite as many tyrants as in the patrician, and vastly fewer compensations.  At the age of forty-four she believed herself to be a philosopher.

Six months before Mariette’s marriage and shortly after the birth and death of her last child, Frau von Niebuhr suddenly returned to her bed, prostrate, on the verge of collapse.  The count raged that any wife of his should dare to be ill or absent (when not fulfilling patriotic obligations), consult her own selfish whims by having nerves and lying speechless in bed.  But he had a very considerable respect for Herr Doktor Meyers—­a rank plebeian but the best doctor in Berlin—­and when that family adviser, as autocratic as himself, ordered the Frau Graefin to go to a sanatorium in the Austrian Dolomites—­but alone, mind you!—­and remain as long as he—­I, myself, Herr Graf!—­deemed advisable, with no intercourse, personal or chirographical with her family, the Head of the House of Niebuhr angrily gave his consent and sent for a sister to chaperon his girls.

The countess remained until the eve of Mariette’s wedding, and she passed those six months in one of the superlatively beautiful mountain resorts of Austria.  She was solitary, for the most part, and she did an excessive amount of thinking.  She returned to her duties with a deep disgust of life as she knew it, a cynical contempt for women, and a profound sense of revolt.  Her natural diplomacy she had increased tenfold.

When the three girls, their eyes very large, and speaking in whispers, although their father was at a yearly talk-fest with his old brothers in arms, confided to their mother their resolution never in any circumstances to adopt a household tyrant of their own, she nodded understandingly.

“Leave it to me,” she said.  “Your father can be managed, little as he suspects it.  I’ll find the weak spot in each of the suitors he brings to the house and set him against all of them.”