So did Gisela Doering.  He sighed that a woman who would have graced the court of his Kaiser should have been tossed by a bungling fate into the rank and file of the good German people; so laudably content to play their insignificant part in their country’s magnificent destiny.

Gisela never told him the truth.  Sometimes, irritated by his subtle arrogance, she was tempted.  Also consuming love tempted her.  But of what use?  She was without fortune and he must add to his.  He had a limited income and expensive tastes, and when a young nobleman in the diplomatic service marries he must take a house and live with a certain amount of state.  Moreover, he intended to be an ambassador before he was forty-five, and he was justified in his ambitions, for he was exceptionally clever and his rise had been rapid.  But now he was care-free and young, and love was his right.

Gisela understood him perfectly.  Not only was she of his class, but her brother Karl had madly loved a girl in a chocolate shop and wept tempestuously beside her bed while their father slept.  He married philosophically when his hour struck.

But if she understood she was also romantic.  She forgot her vow to live alone, her mother’s advice, and dreamed of a moment of overwhelming madness which would sweep them both up to the little church on the mountain.  There, like a true heroine of old-time fiction, she would announce her own name at the altar.  This moment, however, did not arrive.  Nettelbeck, too, was romantic, but his head was as level within as it was flat behind.  He never went near the church on the mountain.

There was no surface lovemaking during the first two summers, or in the winter following the second summer, when he came over from Washington on her Wednesday as often as he could, and they had luncheon and tea in byway restaurants.  They were both fascinated by the game, and they had an infinite number of things to talk about, for their minds were really congenial.  They disputed with fire and fury.  It was a part of Gisela’s dormant genius to grasp instinctively the psychology of foreign nations, and before she had been in the United States a year she understood it far better than Nettelbeck ever would.  Even if he had despised it less he would have lavished all the resources of his wit upon a country so different from Germany in every phase that it must necessarily be negligible save as a future colony of Prussia, if only for the pleasure of seeing Gisela’s long eyes open and flash, the dusky red in her cheeks burn crimson and her bosom heave at his “junker narrow-mindedness and stupid arrogance”—­; “a stupidity that will be the ruin of Germany in the end!” she exclaimed one day in a sudden moment of illumination, for, as a matter of fact, she had given little thought to politics.  However, she recalled her typical papa.