Last night had marked an immense step forward in her social career; without running after the patronage of influential personages she had seen it quietly and tactfully put at her service.  People such as the Grafin von Tolb were going to be a power in the London world for a very long time to come.  Herr von Kwarl, with all his useful qualities of brain and temperament, might conceivably fall out of favour in some unexpected turn of the political wheel, and the Shalems would probably have their little day and then a long afternoon of diminishing social importance; the placid dormouse-like Grafin would outlast them all.  She had the qualities which make either for contented mediocrity or else for very durable success, according as circumstances may dictate.  She was one of those characters that can neither thrust themselves to the front, nor have any wish to do so, but being there, no ordinary power can thrust them away.

With the Grafin as her friend Cicely found herself in altogether a different position from that involved by the mere interested patronage of Lady Shalem.  A vista of social success was opened up to her, and she did not mean it to be just the ordinary success of a popular and influential hostess moving in an important circle.  That people with naturally bad manners should have to be polite and considerate in their dealings with her, that people who usually held themselves aloof should have to be gracious and amiable, that the self-assured should have to be just a little humble and anxious where she was concerned, these things of course she intended to happen; she was a woman.  But, she told herself, she intended a great deal more than that when she traced the pattern for her scheme of social influence.  In her heart she detested the German occupation as a hateful necessity, but while her heart registered the hatefulness the brain recognised the necessity.  The great fighting-machines that the Germans had built up and maintained, on land, on sea, and in air, were three solid crushing facts that demonstrated the hopelessness of any immediate thought of revolt.  Twenty years hence, when the present generation was older and greyer, the chances of armed revolt would probably be equally hopeless, equally remote-seeming.  But in the meantime something could have been effected in another way.  The conquerors might partially Germanise London, but, on the other hand, if the thing were skilfully managed, the British element within the Empire might impress the mark of its influence on everything German.  The fighting men might remain Prussian or Bavarian, but the thinking men, and eventually the ruling men, could gradually come under British influence, or even be of British blood.  An English Liberal-Conservative “Centre” might stand as a bulwark against the Junkerdom and Socialism of Continental Germany.  So Cicely reasoned with herself, in a fashion induced perhaps by an earlier apprenticeship to the reading of Nineteenth Century articles, in which the possible