That she had rescued her
country and incidentally the world, making democracy and liberty safe
for the first time in its history, mattered nothing to her then. Nor her
immortal fame.

To regret was impossible. Strong souls are inaccessible to regret. But
she hated life and her bitter destiny, for she had sacrificed the life
that gave meaning to her own, and she wished that the implacable Powers
that rule the destinies of individuals and nations had foreborne their
accustomed irony and presented her gifts to some woman mercifully
lacking her own terrible power to love and suffer--and the imagination
which would keep for ever vivid in her mind the poignant happiness that
had been hers and that she had immolated on the cold altar of duty. She
was still young, and her sole hope, glimmering at the end of an
interminable perspective, was that it would be her privilege to lie at
last in the grave with this man; who had been her other part and whose
heart and hers she had slain.

THE WOMEN OF GERMANY

An Argument for my "The White Morning"

From _The Bookman_, February, 1918,
by courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co.

THE WOMEN OF GERMANY

An Argument for my "The White Morning"

I have been asked by the Editor of _The Bookman_ to state my authority
for writing _The White Morning_; in other words for daring to believe
that a revolution conceived and engineered by women is possible in
Germany.

Before giving my own reasons, stripped of what glamor of fiction I have
been able to surround the story with, I should like to say that when I
began to put the idea into form I thought it was entirely my own. But
while it is always pleasant to offer this sort of incense to one's
vanity, I should have been more than glad to quote to my editor and
publisher some reliable male authority; a man's opinion, on all
momentous subjects, by force of tradition, far outweighing any theory or
guess that a woman, no matter what her intimate personal experience, may
advance.

Imagine then my delight, when the story was half finished, to read an
article by A. Curtis Roth, in the _Saturday Evening Post_, in which he
stated unequivocally that it was among the possibilities that the women
of Germany, driven to desperation by suffering and privation, and
disillusion, would arise suddenly and overturn the dynasty. Mr. Roth,
who was American vice-consul at Plauen, Saxony, until we entered the
war, has written some of the most enlightening and b