2

It was during her first summer at Bar Harbor that the second determining experience of her life began, and it lasted for three years.  She dwelt upon it to-night with humor, sadness, and, for a moment, thrilling regret, but without bitterness.  That had passed long since.

She was virtual mistress of the house at Bar Harbor, and as the children had a trained nurse and a maid, besides many little friends, she had more leisure than in the city with her one day of complete detachment.  She met Freiherr Franz von Nettelbeck when she was walking with her charges and he was strolling with the little girls of the Howland family.  The introductions were informal, and as they fell naturally into German there was an immediate bond.  Nettelbeck was an attache of the German Embassy who preferred to spend his summers at Bar Harbor.  He was of the fair type of German most familiar to Americans, with a fine slim military figure, deep fiery blue eyes and a lively mind.  His golden hair and mustache stood up aggressively, and his carriage was exceeding haughty, but those were details too familiar to be counted against him by Gisela.  Her rich brunette beauty was now as ripe as her tall full figure, and she was one of those women, rare in Germany, who could dress well on nothing at all.  She too possessed a lively mind, and after her long New York winter was feeling her isolation.  Her first interview (which included a long stroll and a canoe ride) with this young diplomat of her own land, visibly lifted her spirits, and she sang as she braided her heavy mass of hair that night.

Franz, like most unattached young Germans, was on the lookout for a soul-mate (which he was far too sophisticated to anticipate in matrimony), and this handsome, brilliant, subtly responsive, and wholly charming young woman of the only country worth mentioning entered his life when he too was lonely and rather bored.  It was his third year in the United States of America and he did not like the life nor the people.  Nevertheless, he was trying to make up his mind to pay court to Ann Howland, a young lady whose dashing beauty was somewhat overpoised by salient force of character and an uncompromisingly keen and direct mind, but whose fortune eclipsed by several millions that of the high-born maiden selected by his family.

Here was a heaven-sent interval, with intellectual companionship in addition to the game of the gods.  Being a German girl, Gisela Doering would be aware that he could not marry out of his class, unless the plebeian pill were heavily gilded.  To do him justice, he would not have married the wealthiest plebeian in Germany.  An American:  that was another matter.  If there were such a thing as an aristocracy in this absurd country which pretended to be a democracy and whose “society” was erected upon the visible and screaming American dollar, no doubt Miss Howland belonged to the highest rank.  In Germany she would have been a princess—­probably of a mediatized house, and, he confessed it amiably enough, she looked the part more unapologetically than several he could mention.