“You see!” said one of the girls to me afterward.  “I have not exaggerated.  Do you think I want another like that?” And, so far as I know, they have never married.

I did not draw any of my characters on these four delightful girls, but took the episode as a foundation for the incidents and characters that grew under my hand after I got round to the story.

The episode of Georg Zottmyer was also told me by a German girl whom I got to know very well in Munich, and who distantly suggested the character of Gisela (that is to say in the very beginning.  As Gisela developed she became more like her own legendary Brunhilda).[1]

This young woman was as independent in her life and in her ideas as any I ever met in England or the United States.  But fortune had been kind to her.  Her father died just after her education was finished, and as he left little money, she went to Brazil as governess in a wealthy family.  She remained in South America for several years, gaining, of course, poise and experience.  Then a relative died and left her a comfortable fortune.  When I met her she was living in Munich from choice, like so many other Germans who were bored with routine and rigid class lines.

She was a beautiful young woman, with dark hair and eyes and a brilliant complexion, and dressed to perfection, although she wore no stays.  This may have been a bit of vanity on her part, as the awful reformkleid was in vogue, and fat German women were displaying themselves in lumps and creases and billows and sections that rolled like the untrammelled waves of the sea.  Her own figure was so firmly molded and so erect and supple that it was, for all her fashionable clothes, quite independent of the corset.  She had charming manners combined with an imperturbable serenity, and always seemed faintly amused.  On the other hand, she displayed none of the offensive German conceit and arrogance.

We spent several days together at Partenkirchen, one of the most picturesque spots in the Bavarian Alps, and as we were both good walkers, and there was no one else in the hotel who interested us, we became quite intimate.  She was one of the first to talk to me about the deep discontent and disgust of the German women, and of her own utter contempt for the meek hausfrau type, and for the tyrannies, petty, coarse, often brutal, of the man in his home.  Nothing, she was determined, would ever tempt her to marry, and she could name many others who were making an independent life for themselves, although, lacking fortune, often in secret.  No matter how much she might fancy herself in love (and I imagine that she had had her enlightening experiences) she would not risk a lifelong clash of wills with a man who might turn out to be a medieval despot.