But those acute
German brains responded to the high intelligence of their opponents and
to their manifest honesty. Moreover, it was indisputable that from the
beginning the Americans had been in a position to know every side and
detail of the ghastly story, while the Germans, confined within their
own narrow borders and taught that the foreign newspapers were a tissue
of "strategic lies," had been wholly dependent upon their government for
"facts."
During this long debate Gisela sat at the head of the table, rigid and
watchful, when she was not fiercely arguing; Mimi Brandt sprawled in an
easy chair, satirical and slangy, enveloped in smoke; Heloise, very pale
and the first to be convinced, sat with her little hands clenched
against her cheek bones; Ann Prentiss, unshakenly cool quick and
precise; the more brilliant Mrs. Tolby flashing her beacon light into
recesses darkened these three years by systematic lies, but incapable of
the final stupidity.
That long argument need not be reproduced here. All the world has made
up its mind about Germany, knows her far better than as yet she knows
herself. It was the deliberate effort of the Americans to force these
three intelligent Germans, one of them a leader of the first importance,
to realize that their country stood to the rest of the world for lying,
treachery, cruelty, brutality, degeneracy, bad sportsmanship, ostrich
psychology; above all, that she had forfeited her place among modern and
honest nations.
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