shall be allowed to stay in her own room while I am out, and have her meals served there.  But the hotel people are beginning to make a fuss about the trouble, the lack of waiters.  A word from you—­And then if my mind was at ease about her I could go out and do some good with the poor people.  They are getting very restive in the Marolles quarter—­the shocking bad bread, the lack of fuel—­Most of all I should like to help in the hospitals.  My own countrywomen will not have me in theirs.  They suspect me of being a spy in German pay.  Besides, your von Bissing has ordered now that all Belgian, British, and French wounded shall be taken to the German Red Cross.  Well:  if you want to be kind, give me an introduction there.  Surely it would be bare humanity on your part to let an Englishwoman be with some of those poor lads who are sorely wounded, dying perhaps”—­she broke down—­“The other day I followed two of the motor ambulances along the Boulevard d’Anspach.  Blood dripped from them as they passed, and I could hear some English boy trying to sing ‘Tipperary—­’”

“My tear Miss Warren—­I will try to do all that you want—­You will not do anything I want, but never mind.  I will show you that Germans can be generous.  I will speak about your mother.  I am sorry that there are bad-mannered Germans in the hotel.  There are some—­what-you-call ’bounders’—­among us, as there are with you.  It is to be regretted.  As to our Red Cross hospitals, I know of a person who can make things easy for you.  I will write a letter to my cousin—­like me she is a Saxon and comes from Leipzig—­Minna von Stachelberg.  She is but a few months widow, widow of a Saxon officer, Graf von Stachelberg who was killed at Namur.  Oh! it was very sad; they were but six months married.  Afterwards she came here to work in our Red Cross—­I think now she is in charge of a ward...”

So Vivie found a few months’ reprieve from acute sorrow and bitter humiliation.  Graefin von Stachelberg was as kind in her way as her cousin the Colonel, but much less sentimental.  In fact she was of that type of New German woman, taken all too little into account by our Press at the time of the War.  There were many like her of the upper middle class, the professorial class, the lesser nobility to be found not only in Leipzig but in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Halle, Bonn, Muenchen, Hannover, Bremen, Jena, Stuttgart, Cologne—­nice to look at, extremely modern in education and good manners, tasteful in dress, speaking English marvellously well, highly accomplished in music or with some other art, advocates of the enfranchisement of women.  The War came just too soon.  Had Heaven struck down that epilept Emperor and a few of his ministers, had time been given for the New German Woman to assert herself in politics, there would have been no invasion of Belgium, no maltreatment of Servia.  Germany would have ranged herself with the Western powers and Western culture.