mother was Katarina Furst, the daughter and heiress of a brewing
business older and richer than Otto Ottenburg's. As a young woman she
had been a conspicuous figure in German-American society in New York,
and not untouched by scandal. She was a handsome, headstrong girl, a
rebellious and violent force in a provincial society. She was brutally
sentimental and heavily romantic. Her free speech, her Continental
ideas, and her proclivity for championing new causes, even when she did
not know much about them, made her an object of suspicion. She was
always going abroad to seek out intellectual affinities, and was one of
the group of young women who followed Wagner about in his old age,
keeping at a respectful distance, but receiving now and then a gracious
acknowledgment that he appreciated their homage. When the composer died,
Katarina, then a matron with a family, took to her bed and saw no one
for a week.

After having been engaged to an American actor, a Welsh socialist
agitator, and a German army officer, Fraulein Furst at last placed
herself and her great brewery interests into the trustworthy hands of
Otto Ottenburg, who had been her suitor ever since he was a clerk,
learning his business in her father's office.

Her first two sons were exactly like their father. Even as children they
were industrious, earnest little tradesmen. As Frau Ottenburg said, "she
had to wait for her Fred, but she got him at last," the first man who
had altogether pleased her. Frederick entered Harvard when he was
eighteen. When his mother went to Boston to visit him, she not only got
him everything he wished for, but she made handsome and often
embarrassing presents to all his friends. She gave dinners and supper
parties for the Glee Club, made the crew break training, and was a
generally disturbing influence. In his third year Fred left the
university because of a serious escapade which had somewhat hampered his
life ever since. He went at once into his father's business, where, in
his own way, he had made himself very useful.

Fred Ottenburg was now twenty-eight, and people could only say of him
that he had been less hurt by his mother's indulgence than most boys
would have been. He had never wanted anything that he could not have it,
and he might have had a great many things that he had never wanted. He
was extravagant, but not prodigal. He turned most of the money his
mother gave him into the business, and lived on his generous salar