The women could hold meetings under their very noses, so long as they were not in the street, lay their plans to the last fuse, and apply the match at the preconcerted moment from one end of Germany to the other unhindered, unless betrayed.  The angry and restless male socialists would not have a chance with the alert members of their own sex—­who regard women with an even and contemptuous tolerance.  Useful but harmless.

I made Gisela a junker by birth, because a rebel from the top, with qualities of leadership, would make a deeper impression in Germany than one of the many avowed extremists of humbler origin.  On the other hand, it was necessary to drop the von, and take a middle-class name, or she would have failed to win confidence, in the beginning, as well as literary success; from opposite reasons.  It is very difficult for an aristocratic German of artistic talents to obtain a hearing.  Practically all the intellectuals belong to the middle-class, the aristocrats being absorbed by the army and navy.  The arrogance and often brutal lack of consideration of the ruling caste, to say nothing of common politeness, have inspired universal jealousy and hatred, the more poignant as it must be silent.  But even the silent may find their means of vengeance, as the noble discovers when he attempts recognition in the intellectual world.  But if he were a propagandist, with the welfare of all Germany at heart, and won his influence under an assumed name, as Gisela Doering did, the revelation of his identity, together with proof of dissociation from his own class, would enhance his popularity immensely.  Moreover, it would be incense to the vanity of classes that never are permitted to forget their inferior rank.

In this country there is a snobbish tendency to exalt and boom any writer who is known to belong to one of the old and wealthy families; and the more snobbish the writer the more infectious the disease.  But then in this country, which has never suffered from militarism, there is a naive tendency to worship success in any form.  In Germany my heroine would have doomed herself to failure if she had signed her work Gisela von Niebuhr.  But her early education, surroundings, position,—­to say nothing of her four years in the United States—­were just what gave her the requisite advantages, and preserved her from many mistakes.  She starts out with no prejudices against any caste, and an intense sympathy for all German women who lack even the compensation of being hochwohlgeboren.

No one knows what the future holds, or what unexpected event will suddenly end the war; but I should not have written The White Morning if I had not been firmly convinced that a Gisela might arise at any moment and deliver the world.

GERTRUDE ATHERTON.

[Footnote 1:  For this reason I asked the most beautiful woman I have ever seen of the heroic or goddess type to be photographed for the frontispiece.—­G.A.]