It was then that she told me of the tentative proposal of one of her beaux (she had many) “Georg Zottmyer,” which I have recorded almost literally in the scene between this passing character and Gisela in the Cafe Luitpolt.  My object in doing so was to give as realistic an impression as possible of what the German woman is up against in dealings with her male.  I knew Zottmyer personally, and he interested me the more (as one is interested in a bug under a microscope) because he had less excuse for his conceit and arrogance than most German men:  he was brought up in California, where his father is a successful doctor.  But that only seemed to have made him worse.  He returned to Germany as soon as he was of age, more German than the Germans, and despising Americans.

I had often wondered what became of this highly interesting young woman, and when I began to write The White Morning she popped into my mind.  I believe she could be a leader of some kind if she chose.  Perhaps she is.

The cases could be multiplied indefinitely.  The Erkels and Mimi Brandt are drawn, together with their conditions, almost photographically.  “Heloise” finally married a Scot and went with him to his own country, but her sisters were dragging out their tragic lives when I left Munich.

A few days ago I met a highly intelligent American woman of German blood who, before the war, used to visit her relatives in Germany every year.  I told her that I had written this story and she agreed with me that it was on the cards the women would instigate a revolution.  “Never,” she said, “in any country have I known such discontent among women, heard so many bitter confidences.  Their feelings against their fathers or husbands were the more intense and violent because they dared not speak out like English or American women.”

There is no question that for about fifteen years before the war there was a thinking, secret, silent, watchful but outwardly passive revolt going on among the women of Germany.  I do not think it had then reached the working women.  It took the war to wake them up.  But in that vast class which, in spite of racial industry, had a certain amount of leisure, owing to the almost total absence of poverty in the Teutonic Empire, and whose minds were educated and systematically trained, there was persistent reading, meditating upon the advance of women in other nations, quiet debating unsuspected of their masters; and they were growing in numbers and in an almost sinister determination every year.  Of course there were plenty of hausfraus cowed to the door mat, and, like the proletariat, needing a war to wake them up; but there were several hundred thousand of the other sort.

Now, all these women need is a leader.  The working women have their Rosa Luxemburgs, who think out loud in public and get themselves locked up; and, moreover, do not appeal to the other classes—­for Germany is the most snobbish country in the world.  If there were—­or if there is—­such a woman as Gisela Doering, who before the war had acquired a widespread intellectual influence over the awakening women of her race, and then, when they were approaching the breaking point, had gone quietly and systematically about making a revolution, there is no question in my mind as to the outcome.