n
took a long stride. But she forgot him a few moments later at her desk.

4

During the next five years she wrote many short stories and essays, and
four plays. Her work appealed subtly but clearly to the growing
rebellion of the German women; she was too much of an artist to write
frank propaganda and the critics were long waking up to the object of
her work. Her first three plays were failures, but the fourth ran for
two years and a half and was played all over Germany and Austria. It was
a brilliant, dramatic, half-humorous, half-tragic exposition of the
German woman's enforced subservience to man as compared with the
glorious liberty of the somewhat exaggerated American co-heroine.

There was talk of suppressing this play at first, but Countess Niebuhr
brought all her influence to bear, and as the widow of one esteemed
junker and the daughter of another far more important, her argument that
her daughter merely labored to make the German woman a still more
powerful factor in upholding the might of German Kultur--that being the
secret hidden in what was after all but a fantasy--caused the powers to
shrug their shoulders and dismiss the matter.

After all, was not the play by a woman, and were not the German women
the best trained in the world? Besides, the play was amusing, and humor
destroyed the serious purpose always. Humor made the Americans the
contemptible race they were--fortunately for the future plans of
Germany. They took nothing seriously. In time they would!

Those who have not lived in Germany have not even an inkling of the deep
slow secret revolt against the insolent and inconsiderate attitude of
the German male that had been growing among its women for some fifteen
years before the outbreak of the war. They ventured no public meetings
or militant acts of any sort, for men were far too strong for them yet,
and the German woman is by nature retiring, however individualistic her
ego. Their only outward manifestation was the hideous _reformkleid_, a
typical manifestation in even the women of a nation whose art is as ugly
as it often is interesting. But thousands of them were muttering to one
another and reading with envy the literature of woman's revolt in other
lands. When one of their own sex rose, a woman of the highest
intelligence and an impeccable style, who, although she signed herself
Gisela Doering, was said to be a rebellious member of the Prussian
aristocracy, their own vague protests sl