But in a moment these vagrant fancies, drifting from a tired brain, took flight, her reluctant mind focused itself, and she knelt beside the bier, pressing the folds of the cloak about her face and weeping heavily.

It was her final tribute to her womanhood.  That she had rescued her country and incidentally the world, making democracy and liberty safe for the first time in its history, mattered nothing to her then.  Nor her immortal fame.

To regret was impossible.  Strong souls are inaccessible to regret.  But she hated life and her bitter destiny, for she had sacrificed the life that gave meaning to her own, and she wished that the implacable Powers that rule the destinies of individuals and nations had foreborne their accustomed irony and presented her gifts to some woman mercifully lacking her own terrible power to love and suffer—­and the imagination which would keep for ever vivid in her mind the poignant happiness that had been hers and that she had immolated on the cold altar of duty.  She was still young, and her sole hope, glimmering at the end of an interminable perspective, was that it would be her privilege to lie at last in the grave with this man; who had been her other part and whose heart and hers she had slain.

THE WOMEN OF GERMANY

An Argument for my “The White Morning”

From The Bookman, February, 1918,
by courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co.

THE WOMEN OF GERMANY

An Argument for my “The White Morning”

I have been asked by the Editor of The Bookman to state my authority for writing The White Morning; in other words for daring to believe that a revolution conceived and engineered by women is possible in Germany.

Before giving my own reasons, stripped of what glamor of fiction I have been able to surround the story with, I should like to say that when I began to put the idea into form I thought it was entirely my own.  But while it is always pleasant to offer this sort of incense to one’s vanity, I should have been more than glad to quote to my editor and publisher some reliable male authority; a man’s opinion, on all momentous subjects, by force of tradition, far outweighing any theory or guess that a woman, no matter what her intimate personal experience, may advance.

Imagine then my delight, when the story was half finished, to read an article by A. Curtis Roth, in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he stated unequivocally that it was among the possibilities that the women of Germany, driven to desperation by suffering and privation, and disillusion, would arise suddenly and overturn the dynasty.  Mr. Roth, who was American vice-consul at Plauen, Saxony, until we entered the war, has written some of the most enlightening and brilliant articles that have appeared on the internal conditions of any of the belligerent countries since