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.
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