I had an apartment for seven years in Munich and spent six or eight months alternately in that delightful city and traveling in Europe, passing a month or two in England, or returning for an equal length of time to my own country.  During that long residence in Germany I naturally met many of its inhabitants, and of as many classes as possible.  German women do not tell you the history of their lives the first time you meet them, not by any means; they are naturally secretive and the reverse of frank.  But they are human, and when you have won their confidence they will tell you surprising things.  The confidences I received were for the most part from girls, and one and all assured me they never should marry.  Having grown up under one House Tyrant, for whom they were not responsible, why in heaven’s name should they deliberately annex another?  Far, far better bear with the one whose worst at least they knew (and who could not live forever), than marry some man who might be loathsome as well as tyrannical, and who, unless there happened to be a war, might outlive them?

The idea in my novel of the four Niebuhr girls and their initial rebellion was suggested to me by a family of Prussian junkerdom that I met at a watering place in Denmark.  The baroness was a charming woman who used a moderate invalidism in a smiling imperturbable fashion to insure herself a certain immunity from the demands of her autocratic lord.  The girls were lively, intelligent, splendidly educated.  They were in love with society and court functions, but deeply rebellious at the attitude of the German male, and determined never to marry.  That is to say the three younger girls; the oldest had married a tame puppy, and anything less like a tyrant I never beheld.  No American husband could be more subservient.  But there was no question that he belonged to a small exceptional class:  while his wife, with all the dominating qualities of her father, was one of a rapidly increasing number of German women, silently but firmly rebellious.

The Herr baron was a typical Prussian aristocrat and autocrat.  The girls could hardly have had less liberty in a convent.  When they came from their hotel to mine he escorted them over and often came in.  Luckily he liked me or I never should have had the opportunity to know them as well as I did.  Nor should I have been able to continue the acquaintance after the day I wickedly induced them to run away with me to Copenhagen, where we shopped, promenaded all the principal streets, then took ices on the terrace of one of the restaurants.  When we returned he was storming up and down the platform of the station, and he fairly raved at the girls.  “And you dared, you dared, to go to Copenhagen, without permission, without your mother, without me!” The girls listened meekly, but whenever he wheeled laughed behind his military back.  Then he turned on me, but I called him a tyrant and gave him my opinion of his nonsensical attitude generally.  As I was not his daughter he gradually calmed down and seemed rather to relish the tirade.  Finally they all came over to my hotel to tea.