slim military figure, deep fiery blue eyes and a lively mind. His golden
hair and mustache stood up aggressively, and his carriage was exceeding
haughty, but those were details too familiar to be counted against him
by Gisela. Her rich brunette beauty was now as ripe as her tall full
figure, and she was one of those women, rare in Germany, who could dress
well on nothing at all. She too possessed a lively mind, and after her
long New York winter was feeling her isolation. Her first interview
(which included a long stroll and a canoe ride) with this young diplomat
of her own land, visibly lifted her spirits, and she sang as she braided
her heavy mass of hair that night.

Franz, like most unattached young Germans, was on the lookout for a
soul-mate (which he was far too sophisticated to anticipate in
matrimony), and this handsome, brilliant, subtly responsive, and wholly
charming young woman of the only country worth mentioning entered his
life when he too was lonely and rather bored. It was his third year in
the United States of America and he did not like the life nor the
people. Nevertheless, he was trying to make up his mind to pay court to
Ann Howland, a young lady whose dashing beauty was somewhat overpoised
by salient force of character and an uncompromisingly keen and direct
mind, but whose fortune eclipsed by several millions that of the
high-born maiden selected by his family.

Here was a heaven-sent interval, with intellectual companionship in
addition to the game of the gods. Being a German girl, Gisela Doering
would be aware that he could not marry out of his class, unless the
plebeian pill were heavily gilded. To do him justice, he would not have
married the wealthiest plebeian in Germany. An American: that was
another matter. If there were such a thing as an aristocracy in this
absurd country which pretended to be a democracy and whose "society" was
erected upon the visible and screaming American dollar, no doubt Miss
Howland belonged to the highest rank. In Germany she would have been a
princess--probably of a mediatized house, and, he confessed it amiably
enough, she looked the part more unapologetically than several he could
mention.

So did Gisela Doering. He sighed that a woman who would have graced the
court of his Kaiser should have been tossed by a bungling fate into the
rank and file of the good German people; so laudably content to play
their insignificant part in their country's magnificent de