The count despised the entire American race, as all good Prussians did,
but he was as wax to feminine blandishments outside of his family, and
Miss Terriss was pretty, diplomatic, alluring, and far cleverer than he
would have admitted any woman could be. She wound the old martinet
round her finger, subdued her rampant Americanism in his society, and
amused herself sowing the seeds of rebellion in the minds of "those poor
Niebuhr girls." As the countess also liked her, she had been "in and out
of the house" for nearly a year. The young Prussians had alternately
gasped and wept at 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.
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