t the amazing stories of the liberty, the petting, the
procession of "good times" enjoyed by American girls of their own class,
to say nothing of the invariable prerogative of these fortunate girls to
choose their own husbands; who, according to the unprincipled Miss
Terriss, invariably spoiled their wives, and permitted them to go and
come, to spend their large personal allowances, as they listed. Gisela
closed her beloved volume of Grimm's fairy tales and never opened it
again.

But it was the visit of Mariette that had marshalled vague
dissatisfactions to an ordered climax. She had left her husband in the
garrison town she had married with the excellent young officer, making
a trifling indisposition of her mother a pretext for escape. On the
night before her departure the four girls huddled in her bed after the
opera and listened to an incisive account of her brief but distasteful
period of matrimony. Not that she suffered from tyranny. Quite the
reverse. Of her several suitors she had cannily engineered into her
father's favor a young man of pleasing appearance, good title and
fortune, but quite without character behind his fierce upstanding
mustache. Inheriting her father's rigid will, she had kept the young
officer in a state of abject submission. She stroked his hair in public
as if he had been her pet dachshund, and patted his hand at kindly
intervals as had he been her dear little son.

"But Karl has the soul of a sheep," she informed the breathless trio.
"You might not be so fortunate. Far, far from it. How can any one more
than guess before one is fairly married and done for? Look at papa. Does
he not pass in society as quite a charming person? The women like him,
and if poor mama died he could get another quick as a wink. But at the
best, my dear girls, matrimony--in Germany, at least--is an unmitigated
bore. And in a garrison town! Literally, there is no liberty, even with
one's husband under the thumb. We live by rote. Every afternoon I have
to take coffee at some house or other, when all those tiresome women are
not at my own. And what do you suppose they talk about--but invariably?
_Love!_" (With ineffable disdain.) "Nothing else, barring gossip and
scandal; as if they got any good out of _love_! But they are stupid for
the most part and gorged with love novels. They discuss the opera or the
play for the love element only, or the sensual quality of the music. Let
me tell you that although I married to g