The American passengers appeared one and all to be rejoicing over the impotence of the great ship.  Every one of them seemed to be violently pro-Ally, derisively conjecturing the feelings of the Vaterland as every day under her very nose British ships arrived and departed and presently arrived again,—­the same ships she had seen depart coming back unharmed, unhindered by her country’s submarines.  Only the two German ladies, once more ignoring their American allegiance, looked angry.  It was incredible to them, simply unfassbar as they said in their thoughts, that any nation should dare inconvenience Germans, should dare lay a finger, even the merest friendliest detaining one, on anything belonging to the mighty, the inviolable Empire.  Well, these Americans, these dollar-grubbing Yankees, would soon get taught a sharp, deserved lesson—­but at this point they suddenly remembered they were Americans themselves, and pulled up their thoughts violently, as it were, on their haunches.

They turned, however, bitterly to the Twinkler girl as she pushed her way through to her sister,—­those renegade Junkers, those contemptible little apostates—­and asked her, after hearing her question to Anna-Felicitas, with an extraordinary breaking out of pent-up emotion where she, then, supposed she would have been at that moment if it hadn’t been for Germany.

“Not here I think,” said Anna-Rose, instantly and fatally ready as she always was to answer back and attempt what she called reasoned conversation.  “There wouldn’t have been a war, so of course I wouldn’t have been here.”

“Why, you wouldn’t so much as have been born without Germany,” said the lady whose hair came off, with difficulty controlling a desire to shake this insolent and perverted Junker who could repeat the infamous English lie as to who began the war.  “You owe your very existence to Germany.  You should be giving thanks to her on your knees for her gift to you of life, instead of jeering at this representative—­” she flung a finger out toward the Vaterland—­“this patient and dignified-in -temporary-misfortune representative, of her power.”

“I wasn’t jeering,” said Anna-Rose, defending herself and clutching at Anna-Felicitas’s sleeve to pull her away.

“You wouldn’t have had a father at all but for Germany,” said the other lady, the one whose hair grew.

“And perhaps you will tell me,” said the first one, “where you would have been then.”

“I don’t believe,” said Anna-Rose, her nose in the air, “I don’t believe I’d have ever been at a loss for a father.”

The ladies, left speechless a moment by the arrogance as well as several other things about this answer gave Anna-Rose an opportunity for further reasoning with them, which she was unable to resist.  “There are lots of fathers,” she said, “in England, who would I’m sure have been delighted to take me on if Germany had failed me.”